Alec Muffett | |
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Born | Alec David Edward Muffett 22 April 1968 |
Occupation(s) | Internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer |
Alec David Edward Muffett (born 22 April 1968) is an Anglo-American internet security expert and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original password cracker for Unix, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library. He is active in the open-source software community.
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]
In 2015, Muffett was named as one of the top six influential security thinkers by SC Magazine. [3] In October of that year he co-authored [4] RFC 7686 "The ' .onion' Special-Use Domain Name", with Jacob Appelbaum.
More recently, Muffett assisted the New York Times with the creation of their own Tor onion site. [5] Following that he created a temporary Onion Wikipedia site, accessible only over Tor, [6] and assisted building further onion sites for BBC News, [7] Brave, [8] Twitter, [9] The Guardian, [10] and Reddit. [11]
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