Cryptography is an arms race between Alice and Bob, and Eve. These are the names cryptographers give to two people who are trying to communicate privily, and to a third who is trying to intercept and decrypt their conversation. Currently, Alice and Bob are ahead-just. But Eve is catching up. Alice and Bob are therefore looking for a whole new way of keeping things secret. And they may soon have one, courtesy of quantum mechanics. At the moment cryptography concentrates on making the decrypting part as hard as possible. The industry standard, known as rsa (after its inventors, Ron Riv-est, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), relies on two keys, one public and one private.
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