The History of Alice and Bob

&gt;In the history of cryptology, women tend to be either systematically excluded or reduced to objects.<p>This is probably true, but cryptography&#x2F;theoretical computer science might be one area where women have better representation than in other subfields of hard sciences.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shafi_Goldwasser" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shafi_Goldwasser</a>, who invented a huge portion of modern crypto (zero-knowledge, set lower bound, doubly-efficient proofs, etc.)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Irit_Dinur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Irit_Dinur</a>, who basically invented property testing as well as a novel proof of the PCP theorem that wasn&#x27;t hundreds of pages long<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;~danama&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;~danama&#x2F;</a>, also known for her work on the PCP theorem (wife of Scott Aaronson)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;elaineshi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;elaineshi.com&#x2F;</a>, several papers on making ORAM and secure multiparty computation practical<p>Probably notable that the first three listed are all from&#x2F;at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

They used to say &quot;Sex sells&quot;, but in 2017 it&#x27;s &quot;Sexism sells&quot; (or &quot;Diversity sells&quot;).<p>This is a perfectly well-written article with great content, but I don&#x27;t know why the author has to bring up sexism etc.<p>If we didn&#x27;t have &quot;Alice and Bob&quot; and instead had &quot;Albert and Bob&quot;, the trolls would say &quot;oh look at this there&#x27;s no diversity! they are oppressing people by getting rid of female names from examples!&quot;.<p>But we DO have &quot;Alice and Bob&quot;. Alice even comes BEFORE Bob. But look at how people make up sexism stories about how this is an &quot;oppression&quot;, and Alice and Bob are a couple.<p>I have never thought of Alice and Bob as a couple. Maybe it&#x27;s your sick mind who want to monetize sexism, that came up with that imagination.

The article&#x27;s thesis might or might not be true (I don&#x27;t think it is in the field of cryptography), but the article certain it doesn&#x27;t provide anywhere near enough evidence to conclude that the trope of &quot;Alice and Bob&quot; is used to oppress people.<p>The article cites one presentation that a single researcher used as evidence that Alice and Bob are viewed as a couple, but I&#x27;ve seen enough crypto presentations to assert that most researchers don&#x27;t view Alice and Bob as a couple in any way (in fact, many crypto presentations use Bob the builder and Lewis Carroll&#x27;s Alice to represent Alice and Bob, and they certainly don&#x27;t make a couple).

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.<p>If one doesn&#x27;t know this already, it seems to imply that DH exchange led to inventing RSA... Mathematically and also practically they are independent.<p>Edit: To clairfy further: RSA and DH exchanges are not even that commonly used together as they serve two different purposes.<p>With RSA you have a key-pair (public and private) and you can write something with someone&#x27;s public key that only the owner of a private key can read. This is called asymmetric encryption.<p>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.

I find it weird that &#x27;heteronormative&#x27; is now lumped in with &#x27;sexist&#x27; when a hetero world view is literally &#x27;normal&#x27; (as in, held by a significant majority).

Shame the article doesn&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure whether I fully agree with that viewpoint, but it does seem like an important question to discuss.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.cs.ucdavis.edu&#x2F;~rogaway&#x2F;papers&#x2F;moral.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.cs.ucdavis.edu&#x2F;~rogaway&#x2F;papers&#x2F;moral.pdf</a>

Didn&#x27;t Alice and Bob have a hardware column in Computer Shopper in the old days?

I&#x27;ve created a pretty nice combination of these names. &quot;trevalmabo&quot; (Trent,Eve,Alice,Mallory,Bob) - it reads &quot;trust eavesdropping on man in the middle&quot;