History of Alice and Bob (2017) | Hacker News Reader

History of Alice and Bob (2017)

cryptocouple.com

99 pointssusam34 comments

Kind of fun reading that and not only hearing about Diffie and Hellman, but also learning where the initials RSA came from!

Its not this: https://www.thersa.org/

Nor from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427987

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Alice and Bob: A History of the World’s Most Famous Cryptographic Couple (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427987 - July 2019 (18 comments)

The History of Alice and Bob - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14801883 - July 2017 (35 comments)

Cormac McCarthy fans should recognize Alicia and Bobby.

Here's a fun one for you. Recall a certain sleep-deprived fiddler in Blood Meridian saying the following:

"Whatever exists in creation without my knowledge exists without my consent"

Then read Déclaration d'intention de non-publication by Grothendieck (whom Alice mentions in Stella Maris).

I think I recall Alice and Bob also being mentioned along side Louis Reasoner in SICP problem sets in ‘81 or ‘82… (Edit) well, according to Wikipedia, the cast of characters for SICP doesn’t include Alice and Bob. In those years the book didn’t exist yet.

I always assumed the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” had something to do with the use of these names...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064100

If it were “Bob and Alice and Mallory and Eve” you’d have a solid case.

I can't tell. Is this in part a veiled (or not so veiled) criticism of the RSA authors for introducing a female name into the literature, in an explicitly equal manner (the "A" and "B" characters communicate as equals), at a time when most business and technical writing defaulted to "he" for all characters? If so, as someone who saw the chauvinistic era in which the first of the cited papers was written, I would encourage these modern authors to one day recognize that expanding rights and expanding acceptance in society is a long slow process. The fact that you can see more you think those who came before you should have done does not mean those things you want today would have been possible then, or possible today without the incremental progress delivered by earlier agents of change.

What part of it seems like a criticism to you?

I don't know about GP's view, but to me this does seem like a criticism:

"Women have a long history of being depicted as technical objects in computing... gendered assumptions about the characters of Alice and Bob have been read into their fictional lives. Images of Alice, Bob, and Eve depict the three as in love triangles, with Alice and Eve alternately portrayed as disrupting one another’s blissful domestic life with Bob. Visual depictions of Alice, Bob, Eve, and others used in university classrooms and elsewhere have replicated and reified the gendered assumptions read onto Alice and Bob and their cryptographic family, making it clear that Bob is the subject of communications with others, who serve as objects, and are often secondary players to his experience of information exchange. Thus, while Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman used the names “Alice” and “Bob” for a sender and receiver as a writing tool, others have adapted Alice and Bob, in predictable, culturally-specific ways that have important consequences for subsequent, gendered experiences of cryptology."

Does it seem like a criticism of Rivest, Shamir and Adleman using the name Alice? Or of others projecting gendered assumptions onto Alice?

The previous paragraph criticized Ivan Sutherland for so much as drawing a girl's face with sketchpad, so in context this does seem to be critical of RSA.

From the article: “In the history of cryptology, women tend to be either systematically excluded or reduced to objects. The absence of women is both a reflection of the bias of society and historians, and a gap in the employment of women in computing fields.”

What are you are seeing in the article that suggests a “criticism” of the introduction of Alice?

I think it is just overthinking.

Alice and Bob are a couple, and like most couples, there is a woman and a man. The names are short, memorable, and start with A and B. It is natural to choose a couple, as couples often have private conversations. Charlie, probably from the NATO/ICAO alphabet. Eve, like eavesdropper. Malory, like malicious. Trent, like trust.

If there is something special about Alice, I will be more tempted to think about the most famous Alice, the one in Wonderland. Besides the nice story, Lewis Carrol, author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", real name Charles Dodgson was also a mathematician, and he dabbed in cryptography.

Alice and Bob also is used in the Bitcoin whitepaper, taking after the previous usages

Obligatory link to MC++ song "Alice and Bob" from the 2005 album Algorhythms:

https://youtu.be/NHrugBhQfvA?si=fSwl_dupZe5VPzhf&t=407

Articles like this give the impression that any woman who wanted enter Computer Science during these years would have been not taken seriously and pushed out of the field.

I’ll never be able to fully appreciate the difficulty any did face during that time, and to the degree I was ignorant due to a position of privilege I regret my lack of greater initiative.

Entering my CS program I recall (and lamented) the lack of representation even in 100-200 level courses. Women were not choosing this field in great numbers, but what part of nature, nurture and societal influence resulted in this? Clearly, the issues start before formal education.

Now, with my own daughter ready to start the same major in less than a year’s time, I’m still contemplating the same issues with more than a passive interest.

This dynamic is ironic because the very first generation of programmers was very gender-integrated - albeit for sexist reasons: the population drew from "computers", who were largely women. My mother-in-law had a career as a Fortran and COBOL developer and then instructor in the sixties and seventies (which she doesn't think is nearly as cool as I do). At some point it switched (my guess is when the profession became more highly-remunerated). I'd like it to switch back, more quickly.

Based on living in the 80s and pop culture at the time, I have a suspicion: "nerds" weren't cool at all. To do anything with a computer or electronics was seen as the most "non-cool" thing you could do. At the time, women seemed to have all the social control and never did anything (or very rarely, at least) "non-cool."

Thus, I suspect any women interested in the field were pushed away from it by their peers, and women's peer pressure is (traditionally) stronger than men's peer pressure (see Mean Girls for reference).

Anyway, that's my own two cents colored by a childhood.

Women have been part of the field of computer science since the very beginning. Ada Lovelace has a language named after her and arguably was the first programmer. She programmed the at that point theoretical machine created by Charles Babbage. The pattern of female programmers continues when computers really became practical. During WW II, Bletchley park was famously staffed by female computers. And the Eniac had several female mathematicians working on it. A female mathematician named Margaret Hamilton became a programmer at Nasa and ended up heading the team that built the on board flight software for the Appollo program. She also later coined the term software engineering.

It's true that not a lot of woman pursue careers in math, science, etc. That's true today even when there are fewer obstacles than ever for them to do so and a lot of companies, universities, etc. are under pressure to have diversity in their staff and leadership.

I agree entirely very much that it starts very early. It is how children's interests are formed. My older daughter is an electrical engineer, a field in which there are few women. When she was doing A levels (UK exams sat at 18, typically 3 subjects, supposedly APs are the nearest US equivalent, some other countries have similar) she was the only girl doing electronics, but there were a reasonably number doing physics and maths. This was despite the college (meaning British 16 to 18 type) making considerable efforts to encourage girls - but it was far to late. Girls are doing the S and the M of STEM but not the T and the E. I think that has a lot to do with how kids are brought up (e.g. boys helping dad when he is fixing things things but not girls - and it is still usually dad who is fixing things!)

I think what interested my daughter was doing a lot of things I found interesting because she spent a lot of time with me - she was home ed for some formative years (which i also think helped prevent her picking up some stereotype of what women should do), and I worked from home when she was about an year old.

My younger daughter may or may not go into an engineering or tech career, but it is definitely an option that is interesting.

often reflecting of the sexist and heteronormative environments in which they were born and continue to be used

Strange line for a cryptography article.

Not strange at all for a history article, though.

Disappointing that this website is only served unencrypted...

Yeah it'd be a real shame if someone were able to intercept the unencrypted traffic. They'd be able to read all the articles!

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