Quote from: Twelve_Pickles on October 03, 2012, 01:59 pmWho are these people you speak of pine?In the crypto literature, there is this collection of people used to represent certain things e.g. illustrating how a MITM PGP attack works.Alice encrypts message with Bob's public key and sends it along with Alice's public key to Bob. Bob uses Alice's public key to encrypt a message to Alice. So they communicate secretly. Then Eve comes along and pretends to be Alice. Eve sends her public key to Bob and claims she is Alice. If Bob believes Eve, then he'll send messages to Alice which are actually encrypted for Eve. Then Eve can read Bob's messages to Alicea and prevent Bob or Alice realizing what is going on by re-encrypting Bob's messages to Alice's public key and passing them onto Alice as if they were from Bob.And that folks, is why you should always be using signed messages if anybody tells you they're changing their public key.More importantly in the context of this thread, Alice and Bob and Eve etc have become so popular in books and journals that they are now developed characters with rich and varied histories. As such, I think these characters should become anthropomorphized fully into full blown personalities, there should be posters, artwork, music, movie scripts, Alice and Bob action figures and so on. By turning Alice and Bob into badasses we can make cryptography cool for people who wouldn't normally touch it with a bargepole :)Of course it's not just Alice and Bob. There are others too: See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob