Alice and Bob are the most famous virtual couple in the field of cryptography. Since their "birth" in 1978, and in the mobile Internet era of the 21st century, as the protagonists of fictional stories, Alice and Bob have not only excelled in computer theory and logic. , quantum computing and other fields related to cryptography, and their names gradually appear in papers in economics, physics, and other engineering fields.
In the field of cryptography, there is a famous cryptosystem: RSA cryptosystem. The RSA cryptosystem is the first public-key cryptography system proposed by cryptography. The name RSA comes from the three cryptographers Rivest and Shamir who invented this cryptography system. , Adleman's acronym.
Alice and Bob first appeared in February 1978, in the paper "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures" published in "Communications of the ACM" by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. and Public-key Cryptosystems). Alice and Bob are used for the first time in this paper to describe the scheme, so February 1978 becomes Alice's and Bob's birthdays.
According to Rivest’s own recollection, there were two main reasons for initially using Alice and Bob: First, Alice and Bob could replace sender A and receiver B, which had been frequently used in the field of cryptography but were boring; second, Alice and Bob were well known They are female and male names respectively, so that she and he can be used to refer to Alice and Bob in the paper to avoid confusion. In this way, Alice and Bob are also endowed with personality, becoming more three-dimensional and graphic, helping readers understand the whole process of communication more easily.
As for why it is Alice and Bob, Rivest guesses that it may be because he is more obsessed with "Alice in Wonderland".
This was the first time Alice and Bob ever connected to cryptography, and thus began a long and storied history.
After 1978, Alice and Bob quickly emerged in the field of cryptography and became "famous figures" in the field of cryptography. Slowly, many cryptographers began to replace A and B with Alice and Bob.
In 1979, Shamir, Rivest and Adleman, the inventors of the RSA algorithm, mentioned Alice and Bob in their chapter "Mental Poker";
In 1981, cryptographer Michael O. Rabin also mentioned this in a technical report "How to Exchange Secrets with Oblivious Transfer" written for Harvard University's Aiken Computing Lab. Alice and Bob.
In 1981, cryptographer Manuel Blum published a report titled "Coin Flipping by Telephone: A Protocol for Solving Impossible Problems". The first sentence in the article reads: "Alice and Bob want to flip a coin by telephone."
In previous papers or reports, cryptographers generally only use Alice and Bob instead of A and B, and Alice and Bob are more like a code name. But in this report, Manuel Blum really brought Alice and Bob into the background story, becoming two three-dimensional characters in the story. And it is from this time that Alice and Bob have a history and start to acquire personalities. Manuel Blum wrote: "They have just divorced, live in different cities, want to decide who gets the car."
However, not all cryptographers use Alice and Bob. For example, the cryptographer ElGamal published a paper titled "A Public Key Cryptosystem and a Signature Scheme Based on the Discrete Logarithm Problem" (A Public Key Cryptosystem and a Signature Scheme Based on Discrete Logarithms) article does not mention Alice and Bob. For another example, in 1988, cryptographers Silvio Micali, Charles Rackoff and Bob Sloan were also ambiguous about the use of Alice and Bob. They wrote: The goal is that A(lice)... becomes able to securely send a message m to B(ob ).
The event where Alice and Bob became the protagonists of cryptography was the "after-dinner speech" about Alice and Bob delivered by cryptologist John Gordon at the April conference in Zurich, Switzerland in 1984. Gordon adopted a relaxed way to record Alice and Bob's life, sums up the roles of Alice and Bob in cryptography in this talk:
- Bob is a stockbroker and Alice is a stock investor;
- Alice and Bob want to defraud the insurance company together;
- Alice and Bob play poker using the phone;
- Alice wants to hide information about her and Bob's financial transactions from her husband;
- Alice and Bob are being targeted by financial institutions and the police at the same time;
- Alice because of some unknown past, Alice does not trust Bob.
Gordon's speech marked an important fact in the history of Alice and Bob, which ultimately affected the cryptography community, and Alice and Bob also became the virtual protagonists of cryptography. Gordon recalled in a 2005 "Network World" article: Today, nobody remembers I invented Strong Primes, but everyone knows me as the guy who wrote the story of Alice and Bob.
At this point, Alice and Bob have become indispensable "key figures" in the cryptography world, but their "ambition" has obviously not been satisfied, and the "road to expansion" is still continuing.
Although Alice and Bob were born in the academic field of cryptography, they were quickly adopted in other academic fields and contexts as well.
After 1980, Alice and Bob also gradually appeared in the "computer academic field". In 1983, Joseph Y. Halpern and Michael O. Rabin used Alice and Bob in a paper on "Modal logic" .
Later, Alice and Bob also gradually appeared in the field of quantum computing. Bessette, Brassard, Salvail, and Smolin jointly published the paper "Experimental Quantum Cryptography". Chapter 2 of the paper mentioned that quantum cryptography was introduced through the public key cryptography system. With the advent of quantum computing and quantum cryptography, Science began to be discussed in the literature, and Alice and Bob were cited again.
Besides Alice and Bob, there are many other roles in cryptography:
Reference links:
[1]http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/165/papers/RSA-CACM-article.pdf
[2]http://cryptocouple.com/