Alec David Edward Muffett (born April 22, 1968) is an Anglo-American internet security evangelist, architect, and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

password cracker, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library.; He is active in the

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

community.

Career

Muffett joined

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

in 1992, working initially as a

systems administrator A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to ensu ...

. 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 (shortly before Oracle acquired Sun). While at Sun he was one of the researchers who worked on the

factorization In mathematics, factorization (or factorisation, see American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), English spelling differences) or factoring consists of writing a number or another mathematical object as a p ...

of the 512 bit RSA Challenge Number;

RSA-155 In mathematics, the RSA numbers are a set of large semiprimes (numbers with exactly two prime factors) that were part of the RSA Factoring Challenge. The challenge was to find the prime factors of each number. It was created by RSA Laboratories i ...

was successfully factorized in August 1999.RSA-155 is factored!
, rsa.com; accessed March 23, 2017. Muffett also worked on the Sun MD5 hash algorithm, which was introduced in

Solaris Solaris may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...

9 update 2. The new algorithm drew on Muffett's work in pluggable crypt, and has been implemented in many different languages, for example

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

.passlib.hash.sun_md5_crypt - Sun MD5 Crypt
packages.python.org; accessed March 23, 2017. In 2015, Muffett was named as one of the top six influential security thinkers by ''

SC Magazine Haymarket Media Group is a privately held media company headquartered in London. It has publications in the consumer, business and customer sectors, both print and online. It operates exhibitions allied to its own publications, and previously o ...

''. In October of that year he co-authored

RFC RFC may refer to: Computing * Request for Comments, a memorandum on Internet standards * Request for change, change management * Remote Function Call, in SAP computer systems * Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, a modification for Sid Meier's Civ ...

7686 "The '

.onion .onion is a special-use top level domain name designating an anonymous onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the I ...

Special-Use Domain Name A special-use domain name is a domain name that is defined and reserved in the hierarchy of the Domain Name System of the Internet for special purposes. The designation of a reserved special-use domain is authorized by the Internet Engineering Task ...

", with

Jacob Applebaum Jacob Appelbaum (born 1 April 1983) is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. He studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology and was a core member of the Tor project, a free software network d ...

. More recently, Muffett assisted the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' with the creation of their own

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia Sc ...

onion An onion (''Allium cepa'' L., from Latin ''cepa'' meaning "onion"), also known as the bulb onion or common onion, is a vegetable that is the most widely cultivated species of the genus ''Allium''. The shallot is a botanical variety of the onion ...

site.The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service
NYT Following that he created a temporary Onion Wikipedia site, accessible only over Tor, and assisted building further onion sites for

BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...

, Brave and

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

References

External links

Personal blog

Factorization of a 512 Bit RSA Modulus

Crypticide I: Thirteen Years of Crack
{{DEFAULTSORT:Muffett, Alec Computer security specialists 1968 births Living people Alumni of University College London Place of birth missing (living people) American software engineers British software engineers Sun Microsystems people InfoSec Twitter