Is this what they term a no news day story?
'Replace crypto-couple Alice and Bob with Sita and Rama'
A computer scientist has come up with a proposal to replace cryptography's Alice and Bob with characters from Hindu mythology. For decades, techniques to encrypt and decrypt communications have been explained using two imaginary characters, Alice and Bob, and potential eavesdropper Eve. Alice sends a message to Bob, and Eve is …
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Monday 1st October 2012 12:45 GMT Ken Hagan
@Crowley
And there, in fact, you have identified a principle that has been applied to far more fields of knowledge than Alice and Bob have ever been involved with, and which has gone largely unchallenged for a good deal longer than 40 years.
Can we have Brontosaurus back?
Can we redefine the electron to be positive?
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Monday 1st October 2012 08:55 GMT Pete 2
Longer is better
We're told that long passwords are
easier to forgetbetter than short ones. And that longer crypto keys are better than short ones.So it follows that Alice and Bob should be replaced with better, or at least longer, name. to promote this philosophy. I would suggest that in the spirit of pointless changes the following are adopted henceforth:
Anglithorpianositachinquate and Hatmaguptafratarinagarosterlous
and possibly Opfogjrbskfeepnepnkaseyoinnbretn for the interloper
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Tuesday 2nd October 2012 11:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The real villain of the piece
"Tell us how Microsoft do evil crypto, Tom".
I shouldn't think they do. The whole idea is silly.
What I meant was that Windows, from a security point of view, reminds me strongly of the Kali Yuga. Utter disorder, a breakdown of law and custom, nothing can be relied upon...
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Monday 1st October 2012 11:43 GMT Aaron Em
Re: A lot of hostility here
Oh, indeed! Take Stalin -- thirty million dead at a stingy estimate, and all in the name of that nasty ol' God! A more staunch believer it would be impossible to find.
Or perhaps, if we're going to talk about it from a religious point of view, we'll need to concede that soi-disant atheism has racked up a quite impressive score of its own over the years -- rather more than any of the religions have been managing lately, in fact, Islam and all -- and, in light of this perhaps unpalatable but certainly incontrovertible fact, godly vs. godless appears to be a distinction without a difference? That what one finds atop a mountain of skulls is perhaps not the moral high ground?
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Monday 1st October 2012 16:06 GMT harmjschoonhoven
Re: A lot of hostility here
@AC at 11:52 GMT
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili a.k.a. Stalin HAD a religion
after he lost his faith at the Tiflis seminary in 1896: Marxism.
He always has seen himself as special and deified himself
with unimaginable consequences.
Vid. "Young Stalin" by Simon S. Montefiore, page 66.
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Monday 1st October 2012 21:57 GMT spatulasnout
Re: A lot of hostility here
Re: "... godly vs. godless appears to be a distinction without a difference"
While I'd agree homo sapiens don't require a religious framework to justify the perpetration of evil acts, is it not relatively rare for someone to do evil /in the name of/ atheism? For instance, of all those involved in preaching the sins of contraceptive use in AIDS-plagued sub-Saharan Africa, are there any likely to be doing so on the basis of a lack of belief in a deity?
On the Stalin question in particular, Christopher Hitchens had voiced a detailed reply:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyIf2F_NPXM#t=43s
"Until 1917, millions of Russians were taught for hundreds of years that the Tsar is the head of the church. Which he was, the Russian Orthodox Church. That the leader of the country should be something a little more than human, not a god but he's a little more than, -- he's not quite divine but he's a Holy Father.
If you're Joseph Stalin, you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you don't know how to exploit an inheritance like that: millions of credulous, servile people. And what does he do? Lysenko's biology, miracles.
We can have three harvests a year if we believe in Lysenko's biology. Inquisition, heresy hunt, orthodoxy, everything comes from the top and must be thanked for and groveled for, a complete replication of the preceding theocracy.
For your arguments to have any force at all, you'd have to point to a society that adopted the teachings of Lucretius, Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein, and then fell into famine, dictatorship, torture, and genocide. And you won't, I think, be able to point to such. That's what you'd need for a level playing field."
(Interviewer: You truly wish to blame the crimes of Joseph Stalin on Christianity?)
"No, I was very careful to say, Stalin is gifted a legacy of backwardness, servility, and incredulity inculcated by Christianity and he replicates the conditions of political theocracy and he keeps the church in his corner all throughout the war and throughout the collectivization. Look it up. The church had to split on the question. Those who didn't like it had to leave for America.
And the religious mentality is very clearly shown in the totalitarian mass movements of leader worship and the Fuhrer Princip and their heresy hunts and proclamations of miracles. Yes, it's an allotropic form of the same thing."
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Tuesday 2nd October 2012 10:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A lot of hostility here
Right. Now that things have settled down ...
First, the position we start from. The old joke of the couple asking directions, "Well, if I was you, I wouldn't be starting from here..." is a good analogy. We've got what we've got. It isn't a brilliant start, but...
...as I've said before in other arenas and I say it again now, if any religion had any proof of any of its claims then the world would be a different place ... so why should we tollerate the injection of anything else that further looses direction.
Why the heck should one set of cultural claptrap simply be replaced by another set of cultural claptrap. Let's take things forward on a footing which is based in fact ... heck if you want analogies how about some stars, their agents and the nasty press hackers.
Although I've nothing against religion and culture per-se, I'll get very hostile at anyones attempts to inject their culture, religion, lifestyle, etc. in to MY life, and that is what is happening.
There. I said it. Spade firmly called a shovel. Flame suit donned. Le'mme havit.
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Tuesday 2nd October 2012 10:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A lot of hostility here
...and let me further qualify that ... if there had been a similar situation in any other country, then I'd be open to that as well ... when I'm talking about culture I'm not talking about factual or historical events that made an impact ... but rather fictional things or stuff that multiple cultures would find offensive ... things that wouldn't cross the international borders very well. And we've had enough examples of that over the last few years.
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Monday 1st October 2012 13:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @Michelle Knight
You obviously don't know the original Alice and Bob, the swingers group they belonged to (hence the need for crypto), and why Eve is always trying to intercept their messages (she secretly has the hots for both of them but doesn't get invited to the same parties they do).
It's all explained in that well-known cryptography textbook by E L James, Alice and Bob Get Down and Dirty with Fiona, George, Harriet and Eighteen Others.
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Monday 1st October 2012 21:04 GMT Tim
Re: A lot of hostility here
Ugh. This place is turning into Reddit.
Back on topic. My employer, a US-based software company, has 45 developers, of which 40 are either Indian or Pakistani. I welcome anything that brings a cultural perspective to IT that isn't white, male and western, especially if it comes from a large and growing chunk of the industry's people. I'm no bleeding-heart multi-culti Grauniad reader; I'm just bored of sci-fi and sports analogies. Sita and Rama sound cool. I didn't know anything about them until now, and I'm pleased I've learned something.
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Monday 1st October 2012 09:23 GMT andreas koch
Has it occurred
to his employer that Dr S. Parthasarathy might have too much time on his hands?
Even if replacing Alice, Bob and Eve makes sense from his point of view: They're freaking placeholders!
It's like me proposing to replace the names of directories bin, sys and usr with Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (a hill in New Zealand), Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (a town in Wales) and Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (a lake in Mass./USA)
Someone will probably find a story to incorporate these three without the need of forest-incarcerated deities and fornicating fiends.
Next proposal will be to replace the NATO phonetic alphabet with Amato (for A), Bemato (for B), Cemato (for C) and so on past Omato (for O) and Paradeiser (Austrian for Tomato [so that you don't confuse it with the actual fruit]) all the way to Zeemato (guess what*...).
Zeemato is for X, Y, Z, ß, and ø. Got you there. Hah!
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Monday 1st October 2012 09:24 GMT Guus Leeuw
Mythology is optional
Sir,
Why would one want to introduce religion or mythodology (which led to religion) into a scientific subject?
One might just as well go ahead and say: Sender: God, Receiver: Jesus, Eavesdropper: Maria Magdalena...
As with so many topics in life: Religion / mythodology should stay out of it.
Just my two pennies,
Guus
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Monday 1st October 2012 12:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Oh for heaven's sake...
Yes, but there's no standard involved, is there? Nothing in stone?
Surely any author, lecturer or teacher is perfectly free to make up their own names and their own stories to illustrate the concepts. If Dr P thinks its a good idea to suggest that any particular culture or country uses names that are familiar within that culture or country, then he's free to suggest that. The other 20% of India's population might want to come up with theirs, the Chinese with theirs, etc etc.
The message is simple: when teaching, use stuff that is familiar to your students.
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Monday 1st October 2012 09:37 GMT Ottman001
I'm sure there is room in the world for Alice, Bob, Sita AND Rama. The world is full of cultural differences. You say pot-ate-oh, I say pot-art-oh, etc. I''ll continue to use Alice and Bob in my circles as I presume most of my western colleagues will too. If other parts of the world use names they're more comfortable with, thats up to them. We will live.
I know our American cousins continue to miss the U from colour and call the letter Z "Zee" when it is obviously "Zed". But we tollerate their wacky ways. We can live with reading "Alice" when we see "Sita", even if I do find it odd when messages are no longer sent from A to B but S to R.
Beer, because differences of opinion are often resolved by talking it over with a pint.
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Monday 1st October 2012 09:59 GMT JakeyC
Politically Correct Maths Textbooks
This reminds me of some maths textbooks in the 90s, which tried far too hard to be politically correct.
To the point where every problem was introduced with the same formula of two common British names and a random Eastern/Asian name thrown in:
"Tom, Jane and Harkandreepashka have two apples each..."
"John, Sarah and Cho-Hu-Fung are stood on the points of an equilateral trianle..."
etc.
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Tuesday 2nd October 2012 02:51 GMT Mike 16
Re: How about ..
Problem with "Sender" and "Receiver" is that in most non-trivial cases, there are multiple messages, sent both ways. So it really helps to assign fixed names to the endpoints rather than names that depend on only one message of a group. Thinking back to Modems, even half-duplex ones could both send and receive, just not at the same time. What distinguished roles in the original call setup were "originate" and "answer".
(Me for symmetry. I even like the concept of the old hermaphroditic connectors on IBM channels, although I suppose today they'd be forbidden in U.S. government installations due to the Defense of Marriage Act)
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Monday 1st October 2012 10:10 GMT Cuddles
I really hope he's taking the piss
A message is sent from A to B. Calling them Alice and Bob is basically just a bit of fun, to make things less dry and a bit more human and relatable. Eve is the interceptor because sometimes there can be a C and D that you need to leave space for. While changing them to different letters wouldn't exactly be the end of the world, changing them so that they share the same letter actually would be. How are you supposed to make sense of a scenario where S sends R a message but it's intercepted by R?
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Monday 1st October 2012 15:46 GMT dajames
Re: I really hope he's taking the piss
Eve is the interceptor because sometimes there can be a C and D that you need to leave space for.
Yes, indeed ... that and the fact that she's the Evesdropper. It's a wossname, mnemonic.
... and Trent is the Trusted Third Party because his name begins with "Tr".
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Monday 1st October 2012 10:12 GMT JimC
Grief, what a sad bunch of commentards...
Its entirely appropriate, indeed desirable, to replace the parties in one's analogy according to the culture one is communicating with. To claim otherwise is to be, at least, rather parochial... The schwerpunkt is after all the communication, not the analogy.
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Monday 1st October 2012 11:53 GMT Aaron Em
Re: Grief, what a sad bunch of commentards...
No doubt you'll provide a handy mapping between the heretofore standard Alice, Bob, &c., and a set of correct alternatives for every culture, so I can pass my email text through a simple filter based on the receiving address's TLD as it leaves my mailer.
Or we could just all grin at a neat bit of nationalism from the former Raj, and get on about our daily occasions. Can you guess which I'd rather?
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Monday 1st October 2012 20:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Mapping
Obviously, supplying a mapping must be a function of an appropriate facet of the locales & streams library - suitably updated to use templates to allow for more than just Alice and Bob.
Of course, Microsoft will implement it in a non-standard way, and will recommend the use their own alternative.
Apple will sue over the idea of Bob having rounded corners (3 of them - 4 if rendered totally uppercase).
The Gnome developers will decide that allowing any change in the names is a form of customization and remove it.
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Monday 1st October 2012 10:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm quite happy about it
I've begun to get just a little bit tired of the way any security-related explanation jumps straight into 'Alice and Bob'-speak. I've become to see them as jargon and I often stop reading the moment they appear..
It would be quite refreshing to see some new personnel. Changing the names doesn't have to be by international agreement - people just need to feel free to use whatever actor names best suit the context.
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Monday 1st October 2012 12:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm quite happy about it
<Laugh> no, ADD ain't the problem.
I really do try to wrap my brain around these sort of descriptions. It's just that Alice and Bob are so standard that the descriptions sometimes become standardised and don't necessarily fit what is required to enlighten the reader.
If the author of a piece has chosen different actors then there's at least a chance that they have considered how best to express what they want to convey.
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Monday 1st October 2012 11:25 GMT John H Woods
Sender and Receiver...?
Whatever you call the protagonists, characterising one as a 'sender' and one as a 'receiver' is not, AFAICS, useful for 99% of crytographic communication, which consists of the establishment of a secure bidirectional channel. Alice might contact Bob, but that implies to me that she is the initiator of a secure duplex conversation, not a sender of a message that the receiver might not acknowledge, or that he might acknowledge in the clear.
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Monday 1st October 2012 12:02 GMT magickmark
Jason?
King Pelias has obtained the throne of Thessaly by killing Jason’s father, Jason is born and secretly sent to exile.
Pelias, consults the Oracle and is warned to beware of a man with one sandal.
Later at a series of games that Pelias holds Jason turns up to claim his place as the rightful king. He is wearing only one sandal, after an encounter he Hera, Pelias seeing this sends him on the quest for the Golden Fleece, which Jason accepts and completes, returning to claim his place as King. The story then gets more complicated at this point!
This seems like a good analogy for getting and encrypted key and using it to send a message (in this case the quest for the fleece) and then also for the return message, when Jason comes back to claim the throne.
Not quite a 100% analogy but I am sure it could be made to fit?
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Monday 1st October 2012 12:03 GMT G Watty What?
2 Girls, 1 Cup - A modern cryptography analogy
Surely a modern interpretation would be 2 Girls 1 Cup. Girl 1 wants to send something to Girl 2 but sometimes the cup intercepts it and passes it on.
As a nice side-effect, it may well deter hacking because no-one wants to be "the man in the middle" of that lot.
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Monday 1st October 2012 13:44 GMT Charles 9
I guess to each his own. For cryptologists, using a phonetic nomenclature makes some sense beacuse of historic military applications. And the military is well known for using a phonetic alphabet for transmitting letters clearly, so too here with the idea of phonetic names. The names simply refer to lettered parties, after all (Alice is really Party A and Bob is Party B, Eve is Party E(avesdropper) and Mallory is Party M(alicious)), and most westerners who study it come to realize it as such. If Indians can find a better relation in their lore, so be it; just remember to provide a translation guide should one cross over into the other.
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Monday 1st October 2012 15:45 GMT DrGoon
All Greek
Zeus sent his messenger Hermes to rescue Persephone from Hades. Hades convinced Persephone to eat a poison pomegrane from the Underworld, thus preventing her from being fully restored to the heavens. So we have Bob = Zeus, Alice = Persephone with a message carried by the algorithm Hermes that is subverted by Hades inserting his own data Pomegranate. Since everybody in the whole wide world knows this tale it is perfect.
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Wednesday 3rd October 2012 12:21 GMT George 20
Leave it to india
to just take something that already exists and try to modify it and make it indian. ffs, if it was a swedish person he'd incorporate the nordic gods. It's just some sorry guy who teaches cryptography and finds that using a cultural bias that favors him is better than a cultural bias that favors americans.
A good point was made at https://subversivebytes.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/cryptographys-alice-and-bob-are-here-to-stay/ that if he wants to use indian mythology then he should come up with his own crypto algo and use impose his own cultural bias.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
