Re: Alice and Bobs full name

On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 06:33:41PM +0200, Martin Marcher wrote:
> 2007/9/21, Dave Holland <[email protected]>:
> > On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 05:18:17PM +0200, Martin Marcher wrote:
> > > does anyone by any chance know Alice's and Bob's full name (Alice and
> > > Bob being the famous actors of every security dialog)?
> >
> > The original paper that introduced them -
> > http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/rsapaper.pdf
> > doesn't give them full names.
> 
> hmm from p3
> "For our scenarios we suppose that A and B (also known as Alice and Bob) are..."
> 
> doesn't sound to me like that is the first mentioning. If anyone has
> other sources I'm open to more suggestions, wikipedia lead me to
> something [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_bob and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_%26_Carol_%26_Ted_%26_Alice] but it
> seems Ron Rivest wouldn't want us to call em
> 
>     * Alice Henderson and
>     * Bob Sanders
> 
> martin (not so sure that is the best one could come up with but it
> turns out there isn't much reference to something else)
> 
> PS: The Issue came up because I was tired of having only John and Jane
> Doe's in a test system where I must enter a last name and since i like
> to actually have some sense in the things i type i figured someone
> must have had the same problem...
> 
my impression of the name choice was that they were alphabetic choices
corresponding to a, b, c, the first three letters of the english
language alphabet. (a=alice,b=bob,c=...). As for a name used in a test
system: I used to use names of people I knew
or
star trek characters
or
other random characters in a tv show.
HTH,
K
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