The History of Alice and Bob | Hacker News Reader

The History of Alice and Bob

cryptocouple.com

103 pointsquinndupont35 comments

>In the history of cryptology, women tend to be either systematically excluded or reduced to objects.

This is probably true, but cryptography/theoretical computer science might be one area where women have better representation than in other subfields of hard sciences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafi_Goldwasser, who invented a huge portion of modern crypto (zero-knowledge, set lower bound, doubly-efficient proofs, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irit_Dinur, who basically invented property testing as well as a novel proof of the PCP theorem that wasn't hundreds of pages long

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~danama/, also known for her work on the PCP theorem (wife of Scott Aaronson)

http://elaineshi.com/, several papers on making ORAM and secure multiparty computation practical

Probably notable that the first three listed are all from/at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

I don't think that quote is very true in the context of crypto; in my experience the theoretical crypto community is very open and friendly to all.

Security is another matter; there's lots of politics there, but the crypto community is generally free of that kind of stuff.

Anecdotally, crypto conferences have noticeably more women than other areas of computer science.

From the data, women are better represented in virtually all fields of science, from molecular biology to astronomy to pure mathematics, than they are in computer science. Computer science and physics are the two worst STEM fields for gender parity.

My guess (that's all it is) is that cryptography is an intersection between CS and mathematics, and the mathematics draws more women into the field.

My personal impression is that you're right: there's quite a lot of women cryptographers (thinking of "attendees of crypto conferences", but of "top figures in the field"), but these women are disproportionally from a mathematics background.

They used to say "Sex sells", but in 2017 it's "Sexism sells" (or "Diversity sells").

This is a perfectly well-written article with great content, but I don't know why the author has to bring up sexism etc.

If we didn't have "Alice and Bob" and instead had "Albert and Bob", the trolls would say "oh look at this there's no diversity! they are oppressing people by getting rid of female names from examples!".

But we DO have "Alice and Bob". Alice even comes BEFORE Bob. But look at how people make up sexism stories about how this is an "oppression", and Alice and Bob are a couple.

I have never thought of Alice and Bob as a couple. Maybe it's your sick mind who want to monetize sexism, that came up with that imagination.

The idea of "Sexism sells" is probably a concise explanation of why the whole modern SJW (for lack of a better term) thing bothers me despite the fact I agree with what they are saying for the most part.

It's not just about social justice warriors IMO, it happens everywhere you can translate politically correctness into money.

I would even go further to say social justice warriors are rather cute because all they have to gain is 15 minutes of fame. What's really dangerous is the mainstream media, because they have a lot to gain from using this theme to bring down entities. A lot of controversy => A lot of page views => A lot of ad revenue. And they are desperate for more ad revenue as content becomes more and more commoditized.

There's a serious conflict of interest. While these clueless public bash on other people for being "politically incorrect" after reading these intentionally provocative articles, they don't realize that from media's point of view they're nothing more than vegetable being farmed. This is why I have no sympathy for the dying media companies.

The article's thesis might or might not be true (I don't think it is in the field of cryptography), but the article certain it doesn't provide anywhere near enough evidence to conclude that the trope of "Alice and Bob" is used to oppress people.

The article cites one presentation that a single researcher used as evidence that Alice and Bob are viewed as a couple, but I've seen enough crypto presentations to assert that most researchers don't view Alice and Bob as a couple in any way (in fact, many crypto presentations use Bob the builder and Lewis Carroll's Alice to represent Alice and Bob, and they certainly don't make a couple).

I'm curious what character is typically used for eavesdropper Charles.

I thought Eve was the eavesdropper.

She is. Maybe the parent wonders why A, B is not followed by C. E could stand for eavesdropper or just evil.

I believe E stands for Eve stands for "Eves"dropper.

Ha, I never made that connection.

And who is the man in the middle?

Michael.

Oh wait, my apologies, he's the man in the mirror.

Mallory, the malicious man in the middle.

Aw, you beat me to it. I had a meeting to run to and didn't respond. But adding to that there is a whole wiki (of course there is) about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

I have always seen Alice and Bob as substitutes for person A and person B to make it more personal nothing more, and eavesdropper Eve and malicious Mallory used because the names describe their role

Where does it say that it is used to oppress people?

I remember meeting Bob Morris from NSA back in 1990. He was with his wife. I was bitterly disappointed that she was Anne and not Alice, but at least we got to play croquet.

I am not too happy with the timeline of the article. It seems to conflate RSA and DH exchanges, which are foundamentally different, although can (and are) used together.

If one doesn't know this already, it seems to imply that DH exchange led to inventing RSA... Mathematically and also practically they are independent.

Edit: To clairfy further: RSA and DH exchanges are not even that commonly used together as they serve two different purposes.

With RSA you have a key-pair (public and private) and you can write something with someone's public key that only the owner of a private key can read. This is called asymmetric encryption.

With a DH exchange you can establish a shared secred (usually, a shared key) on an untrusted channel without needing any previously shared data. The shared key can then be used to encypt further communication with symmetric encyption.

But in protocols such as TLS or PGP, the computational requirements of RSA means it is often just used to encrypt a symmetric key, which is then shared with the recipient, in a very similar way to how DH is used to establish a shared secret. I wouldn't say that conflating them in this way is so unrealistic.

The most important and widely used cryptosystem on the Internet uses them together: DH to derive a key, RSA to sign the DH parameters.

I find it weird that 'heteronormative' is now lumped in with 'sexist' when a hetero world view is literally 'normal' (as in, held by a significant majority).

By definition, "normative" means there exists an imperative to conform to the majority condition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative

Huh, I didn't realise it had that connotation. Although I feel better about having missed its meaning, given:

> Normative is sometimes also used, somewhat confusingly, to mean relating to a descriptive standard: doing what is normally done or what most others are expected to do in practice. In this sense a norm is not evaluative, a basis for judging behavior or outcomes; it is simply a fact or observation about behavior or outcomes, without judgment.

This should clarify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity

Agendas must be pushed.

Shame the article doesn't mention [1] - a relatively recent piece from a leading cryptographer, which contends that the use of Alice and Bob (especially with the usual caricatures) makes light of the impact of cryptographic vulnerabilities, and in doing so, makes them less obviously important. I'm not sure whether I fully agree with that viewpoint, but it does seem like an important question to discuss.

[1] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.pdf

Author here: I've never enjoyed the basic premise of the Rogaway article, but that would require its own engagement to properly discuss. That said, I had forgotten about his engagement with Alice and Bob, so I ought to include it. His argument against cutesiness, however, misses the deeper political point, and unfortunately comes off as politically superficial.

That's surprising. What do you perceive to be the basic premise of the Rogaway article? It's certainly not about cutesiness. "Politically superficial" is not how I'd choose to describe it.

If I recall the gist of the Rogaway article, from memory, (again, it's an important enough article that it really does merit serious attention):

he argues 1) cryptographers (and computer scientists in general) should be more political (good!), 2) cryptography needs a new framing (good!), 3) privacy and exception from government search is an unalloyed right (not so good), 4) better crypto will solve privacy issues (not so good).

In sum, the article does a lot of good work, and more than anything, it contains some important and refreshing rethinking of the field of crypto. This is all very important. Nonetheless, it ends up taking for granted a number of political positions that should, I think, also be contested (Rogaway takes the first step!). More crypto does not equal a better world.

Also from memory, but I recall the biggest takeaway from that article being that cryptographers should be mindful that the direction the research community pulls the field to is not necessarily congruent with the public interest. The field of cryptography is fascinated with tricky hard problems, but some of those problems may be more useful to those who would harm privacy than to those who would protect it. So, for instance, if we stipulate an actively hostile signals intelligence community and a polity that is being pushed towards weakening end-to-end crypto, we ought not to be spending much research time making key escrow more effective, which we might accidentally be doing.

I don't think "Alice" and "Bob" have really much to do with it.

Didn't Alice and Bob have a hardware column in Computer Shopper in the old days?

I've created a pretty nice combination of these names. "trevalmabo" (Trent,Eve,Alice,Mallory,Bob) - it reads "trust eavesdropping on man in the middle"

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