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A tale about Alice and Bob

08.Jan.2009

After a study stretch that included some security topics, this paper couldn’t had come in a better occasion. The name is The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech and remounts to a coding theory conference in 1984 (no relation whatsoever with the book, I promise). It’s an humorous introduction on the role the Alice and Bob actors play in technical explanations, and to the hole coding theory field. Two great quotes:

Coding theorists are concerned with two things. Firstly and most importantly they are concerned with the private lives of two people called Alice and Bob. In theory papers, whenever a coding theorist wants to describe a transaction between two parties he doesn’t call then A and B. No. For some longstanding traditional reason he calls them Alice and Bob.

So you see Alice has a whole bunch of problems to face. Oh yes, and there is one more thing I forgot so say – Alice doesn’t trust Bob. We don’t know why she doesn’t trust him, but at some time in the past there has been an incident.

It’s impressive how this kind of traditions lasts in computer science. We got Lenna, foobar and probably much others. I guess when we spend our days thinking in abstract, we endup making some conventional associations with real stuff, just for the hang of it.

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