Alec Muffett

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 57)
Occupation(s)	Internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer

Career

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]