Alec David Edward Muffett (born 22 April 1968) is an Anglo-American internet security expert and software engineer.

Alec Muffett
Born
Alec David Edward Muffett

(1968-04-22) 22 April 1968 (age 56)
Occupation(s)Internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer

Career

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Muffett joined Sun Microsystems in 1992, working initially as a systems administrator. He rose through the ranks to become the principal engineer for security, a position which he held until he was retrenched, with many others, in 2009[1] (shortly before Oracle acquired Sun). While at Sun he was one of the researchers who worked on the factorization of the 512 bit RSA Challenge Number; RSA-155 was successfully factorized in August 1999.[2] He created Crack, the original password cracker for Unix, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library.

In 2015, Muffett was named as one of the top six influential security thinkers by SC Magazine.[3]

Muffett assisted in creating .onion websites for The New York Times,[4] Wikipedia,[5] BBC News,[6] Brave,[7] Twitter,[8] The Guardian,[9] and Reddit.[10]

References

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  1. ^ "Alec Muffett, Profile". LinkedIn. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
  2. ^ RSA-155 is factored! Archived 2012-07-22 at the Wayback Machine, rsa.com; accessed March 23, 2017.
  3. ^ "Top 6 influential security thinkers". SC Media. 14 December 2015.
  4. ^ Sandvik, Runa (27 October 2017). "The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service". Medium. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  5. ^ "Wikipedia over Tor? Alec Muffett experiments with an Onion Wikipedia site". WMUK. 27 November 2017.
  6. ^ al-Salmi, Abdallah (30 October 2019). "Leveraging the Tor Network to circumvent blocking of BBC News content". BBC. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  7. ^ Kero, Ben (5 October 2020). "Brave.com now has its own Tor Onion Service, providing more users with secure access to Brave". brave.com. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  8. ^ Robertson, Adi (9 March 2022). "Twitter is launching a Tor-friendly version of its site". The Verge. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  9. ^ Soul, Jon; Kokkini, Ioanna (6 October 2022). "How we built the Guardian's Tor Onion service". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  10. ^ "Reddit Onion Service Launch : r/redditsecurity". Reddit. 25 October 2022. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
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