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
- 1Why offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?3 people · 250 points · first shared 2022 · 131 comments on HN
- 2Leaving Facebook Engineering in 20162 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 3Experts criticise EU for certificate proposal that enables spying on HTTPS2 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 4On Public Messages, Private Messages and End-to-End Encryption2 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 5Article 159022 people · first shared 2022
- 64Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence1 people · 467 points · first shared 2025 · 775 comments on HN
- 7UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 161 people · 394 points · first shared 2025 · 457 comments on HN
- 8NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to “use Apple encryption”1 people · 376 points · first shared 2025 · 245 comments on HN
- 9Ross Anderson has died1 people · 312 points · first shared 2024 · 35 comments on HN
- 10My interview with Steven Levy re. leaking of my Facebook Goodbye post1 people · 228 points · first shared 2021 · 247 comments on HN
- 11Abuse prevention is tradecraft1 people · 126 points · first shared 2022 · 65 comments on HN
- 12Muffett versus MI51 people · 18 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 13How End-to-End Encryption Is Not Preventing Policing, Arrest, or Conviction1 people · 9 points · first shared 2024 · 3 comments on HN
- 14MatrixDotOrg calling for security to be weakened so more people will adopt them1 people · 7 points · first shared 2022 · 4 comments on HN
- 15UK House of Lords amendment seeks client-side scanning to stop "viewing of CSAM"1 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
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
dang · 2023-11-02
Related:
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/11/2/eu-digital-identity-framework-ei…
https://alecmuffett.com/article/108139
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109581 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109731 respectively, but we merged the comments hither)
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.")
contact9879 · 2023-12-07
The whitepapers:
Messaging:
https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MessengerEnd-to-…
Labyrinth E2EE storage:
https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/TheLabyrinthEncr…
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Comments by:
Jon Millican
https://twitter.com/JonMillican/status/1732582565884702982
Matt Green
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1732567051607089348
Alec Muffet
https://alecmuffett.com/article/108588