
Alec Muffett

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 (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. 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.
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". 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 was a director of the Open Rights Group from October 2011 until January 2020.
Muffett has blogged 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.
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.
In 2015 Muffett was named as one of the Top 6 influential security thinkers by SC Magazine. In October of that year he coauthored 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. Following that he created a temporary Onion Wikipedia site, accessible only over Tor, and assisted building further onion sites for
BBC News
and Brave
Previously, Muffett has worked as a software engineer for Facebook, leading the team which added end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. and as Principal Engineer, Infrastructure Security at Deliveroo.
In July 2020 Muffett shared DoHoT (DNS over HTTPS over Tor) which tunnels DoH queries over Tor with a reasonable latency.
Criticism.
Muffett is active on Twitter
where he regularly comments on subjects such as end-to-end encryption.
Some have characterised some of Muffett's tweeting as 
rude,
bullying,
or toxic discussion.
In December 2020 Muffett characterized the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal as a consequence of the
“somewhat-forced opening of Facebook's APIs to enable competition”,
while others say that it was Facebook's lax policy that allowed apps to access data from a user's friends by default.
In 2020 Muffett criticized the irony of a NYU political ad targeting research tool on the basis that it was architecturally similar to other, contentious privacy technologies.
Facebook attempted to shut the project down.