Alec Muffett

alecmuffett.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2020

Alec Muffett, a security engineer who worked on Facebook's Tor onion site, writes about Tor, encryption, and UK and EU surveillance policy.

What HN saysHN links it for explanations of onion addresses, answers from the author himself, and posts on UK and EU encryption and surveillance proposals.
30HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
35stories submitted
2.2Kstory points
4 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026

Most-shared posts

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    Leaving Facebook Engineering in 2016
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
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    Article 15902
    2 people · first shared 2022
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    4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence
    1 people · 467 points · first shared 2025 · 775 comments on HN
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    Ross Anderson has died
    1 people · 312 points · first shared 2024 · 35 comments on HN
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    Abuse prevention is tradecraft
    1 people · 126 points · first shared 2022 · 65 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Muffett versus MI5
    1 people · 18 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
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What HN people wrote when they linked it

pseudalopex · 2022-08-18
They stress tested a compute farm for by brute forcing onion addresses. About 10 per week per CPU started with facebook. corewwwi was their favorite.[1] Onion addresses are longer now. [1] https://alecmuffett.com/article/15996
esnard · 2022-03-09
Alec Muffet, who helped Twitter on this, replied to your question on his blog: Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor? [0] [0] https://alecmuffett.com/article/16007
tanduv · 2022-03-09
One of the devs working on this already answered - https://alecmuffett.com/article/16007
kingosticks · 2022-01-18
> let's assume it's accurate. This article tries to understand where that number comes from (and fails to do so): https://alecmuffett.com/article/15902
alecmuffett · 2022-01-18
Confusingly, perhaps intentionally so, it's a global number, not a UK one. Details here. https://alecmuffett.com/article/15902 Disclosure: I wrote the blogpost.
bewaretheirs · 2021-11-10
A comment by an ex-facebooker with a few suggested workarounds for this sort of block: "... the the situation presents an educational opportunity to explore simple means to bypass to such mechanisms; ... reverse search terms, add extra search terms, mis-spell names so that the system “helpfully” fixes your typo for you after the block would have been applied in the pipeline." https://alecmuffett.com/article/15333
bostik · 2021-08-02
> Not encrypted, hashed. I'm sure you know this, but to provide some context for others - this is one of the few spots where ambiguity between [password] encryption and hashing may have played a role. OP stated they used crack(1) shortly before L0pth was founded. That puts the timeline somewhere between 1989 and 1992. Although salted MD5 passwords had already become a known thing by then, there would have been legacy setups where some of the password database entries were indeed outputs from ancient implementations of crypt(3). Which implies DES. To this day, if anyone wants to take a look at the crack sources[0], or download a prebuilt package[1], the default mode of operation is "I want to run passwords through crypt(3)". According to crypt(5) manpage, the legacy DES mode is still supported - just look for the string "descrypt". 0: https://alecmuffett.com/alecm/software/crack/ 1: https://packages.debian.org/sid/crack (has a link to "crack-md5" package; description states: "This package provides the runtime files for the crypt() version.")

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