Musical Geek Friday #14: Alice and Bob

This week on Musical Geek Friday a song about the lovely cryptographic couple Alice and Bob!

Alice and Bob song is written by a guy MC Plus+. His real name is Armand Navabi and he's computer science Ph.D. student at Purdue University. His moniker is a pun on the name C++.

The song is about three different topics in cryptography.

First, the song talks about various archetypes used in cryptography. They are Alice, Bob, Trent, Mallory and Eve. Alice and Bob are the usual persons trying to communicate securely. They both trust Trent, who helps them communicate. Meanwhile Eve tries to eavesdrop their communication and Mallory tries to modify their messages!

Then, it covers cryptography algorithms -- the insecure 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, secure Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, and not-so-secure Blowfish algorithm.

Lastly, the song reaches the problem of factoring numbers for which no algorithm in polynomial time is known.

This song is similar to the first song I ever posted on Musical Geek Friday -- Crypto.

Here it is! The Alice and Bob song:

[audio:http://www.catonmat.net/download/mc_plus_plus-alice_and_bob.mp3]

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Alice and Bob lyrics:

Alice is sending her message to Bob
Protecting that transmission is Crypto's job
Without the help of our good friend Trent,
It's hard to get that secret message sent
Work tries to deposit the check of your salary
But with no crypto, it'll be changed by Mallory
You think no one will see what it is, you believe?
But you should never forget, there's always an Eve...

[Chorus]
'Cause I'm encrypting s**t like every single day
Sending data across the network in a safe way
Protecting messages to make my pay
If you hack me, you're guilty under DMCA

DES is wrong if you listen to NIST
Double DES ain't no better man, that got dissed
Twofish for AES, that was Schneier's wish
Like a shot from the key, Rijndael made the swish
But Blowfish is still the fastest in the land
And Bruce used his fame to make a few grand
Use ECB, and I'll crack your ciphertext
Try CFB mode to keep everyone perplexed

[Chorus]
'Cause I'm encrypting s**t like every single day
Sending data across the network in a safe way
Protecting messages to make my pay
If you hack me, you're guilty under DMCA

Random numbers ain't easy to produce...
Do it wrong, and your key I'll deduce
RSA, only public cipher in the game
Creating it helped give Rivest his fame
If we could factor large composites in poly time,
We'd have enough money to not have to rhyme
Digesting messages with a hashing function
Using SHA1 or else it won't cause disfunction

[Chorus]
'Cause I'm encrypting s**t like every single day
Sending data across the network in a safe way
Protecting messages to make my pay
If you hack me, you're guilty under DMCA

Password confirmed. Stand by...