Alec Muffett

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.

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 (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.

In 2015, Muffett was named as one of the top six influential security thinkers by SC Magazine. In October of that year he co-authored 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. Following that he created a temporary Onion Wikipedia site, accessible only over Tor, and assisted building further onion sites for BBC News, Brave, Twitter, The Guardian, and Reddit.