Alec Muffett
| Alec Muffett | |
|---|---|
 Alec muffett.jpg | |
| Born | Alec David Edward Muffett April 22, 1968 |
| 💼 Occupation | Internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer |
Alec David Edward Muffett (born April 22, 1968) is an Anglo-American internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer. He is principally known for his work on Crack, the original Unix password cracker, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library; he is also active in the open-source software community.
Tech 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] Muffett also worked on the Sun MD5 hash algorithm, which was introduced in Solaris 9 update 2. The new algorithm drew on Muffett's work in pluggable crypt, and it is now implemented in many different languages, for example Python.[3]
The algorithm uses the complete text of the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "To be or not to be, that is the question..." as the constant data. Muffett justified the choice of this text because "it exposes more programmers to Shakespeare, which has got to be a good thing".[4] After a sabbatical year, Muffett began to work on The Mine! Project, as lead developer. He subsequently became a director and consultant at Green Lane Security; he also consults for Surevine. He became a director of the Open Rights Group in October 2011.[5] Muffett blogs professionally, for Computer World at Unscrewing Security and personally at Dropsafe, and has numerous publications to his credit, besides being a frequent presenter at technical conferences.[6]
Muffett is a co-inventor (with Darren Moffat and Casper Dik) of the patent "Method and apparatus for implementing a pluggable password obscuring mechanism", United States Patent 7,249,260, Issued June 12, 2003.[7]
In 2015 Muffett was named as one the Top 6 influential security thinkers by SC Magazine [8]. In October of that year he coauthored [9] RFC 7686 "The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name", with Jacob Applebaum.
More recently, Muffett assisted the New York Times with the creation of their own Tor onion site.[10]. Following that he created an Onion Wikipedia site, accessible only over Tor [11]
Previously, Muffett worked as a software engineer for Facebook, leading the team which added end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. [12]. Currently, he works as Principal Engineer, Infrastructure Security at Deliveroo [13].
References
- ↑ [1], LinkedIn; accessed March 23, 2017.
- ↑ RSA-155 is factored! Archived 2012-07-22 at the Wayback Machine, rsa.com; accessed March 23, 2017.
- ↑ passlib.hash.sun_md5_crypt - Sun MD5 Crypt, packages.python.org; accessed March 23, 2017.
- ↑ [2] OpenSolaris, Pluggable Crypt, and the SunMD5 Password Hash Algorithm
- ↑ [3] Board of Directors, Open Rights Group
- ↑ Alec Muffett's Speaking History, Lanyrd.
- ↑ "Patent: Method and apparatus for implementing a pluggable password obscuring mechanism", Google Patents.
- ↑ Top 6 influential security thinkers
- ↑ RFC 7686 "The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name"
- ↑ The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service NYT
- ↑ Wikipedia over Tor? Alec Muffett experiments with an Onion Wikipedia site
- ↑ I've retired from FB now Twitter
- ↑ [4]
External links
This page was moved from wikipedia:en:Alec Muffett. It's edit history can be viewed at Alec Muffett/edithistory
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This page exists already on Wikipedia. |
