177: Alice and Bob
| Alice and Bob |
 Title text: Yet one more reason I'm barred from speaking at crypto conferences. |
[edit] Explanation
Any good cryptography presentation will include at least one story about Alice and Bob. They are the canonical "protagonists" of the crypto world, frequently used in illustrations to demonstrate how a cryptographic system works. (The names were mostly chosen to abbreviate to A and B.)
Here, Randall casts the story in a different light. Instead of Alice and Bob being perfectly innocent people who just want to communicate in private, Bob is actually having an affair with Alice, and his former partner, upset, cracked the encryption to see what the message contained. Nevertheless, the "gossipy cryptographic protocol specs" all took Alice's side (since the goal of any good crypto system is, of course, to succeed in this struggle).
The rest of the comic makes a few other allusions to cryptography:
- Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest are two well-known cryptographers. They have written lots of papers that use Alice and Bob as examples (Alice / Bob fanfic, if you will).
- Public and private keys are two extremely large numbers, chosen such that there's a mathematical relation between them, and yet it's extremely hard (i.e. would take many billions of years) to derive the private key from the public key. They're the basis of asymmetric cryptography. A public-key authenticated signature is a way of cryptographically proving that a certain person created a file, as only that person could have possibly generated that signature. One downside is that anybody who has the public key can verify who a message is from, so it removes plausible deniability; Bob's partner clearly knew that Alice and Bob were communicating, on disks marked by lipstick hearts no less.
- A known-plaintext attack is a type of cryptographic attack where the plaintext (i.e. unencrypted text) of a message is known, and the attacker wants to figure out the keys used to encrypt the message. The woman is saying that she should have known all along that the messages were adulterous in nature.
Finally, in a twist ending, the girlfriend is revealed to be none other than Eve, the eavesdropper, who is also ubiquitous in Alice and Bob stories. Hell hath no fury, indeed.
The title text continues the theme of Randall getting barred from speaking at conferences due to his unusual take on certain topics.
To further spice things up, there are many other characters in the Alice/Bob canon, including Mallory, the malicious, who wants to actually alter the message with nefarious intent; Craig, the cracker, who doesn't particularly care about the message but does care about the passwords used; and Chuck, a third party in the communication who secretly has a villainous intent.
[edit] Transcript
- [Eve stands in the frame, talking to the reader.]
- Eve: I'm sure you've heard all about this sordid affair in those gossipy cryptographic protocol specs with those busybodies Schneier and Rivest, always taking Alice's side, always labeling me the attacker.
- Eve: Yes, it's true. I broke Bob's private key and extracted the text of her messages. But does anyone realize how much it hurt?
- Eve: He said it was nothing, but everything from the public-key authenticated signatures on the files to the lipstick heart smeared on the disk screamed "Alice."
- Eve: I didn't want to believe. Of course on some level I realized it was a known-plaintext attack. But I couldn't admit it until I saw it for myself.
- [Eve places her hands on her hips.]
- Eve: So before you so quickly label me a third party to the communication, just remember: I loved him first. We had something and she tore it away. She's the attacker, not me. Not Eve.
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