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2024-10-05 09:30:02

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Alice had a message to send. "I have a message to send", she announced over the public channels. Eve, who always paid excessive attention to everything Alice said, thought that this sounded interesting, and resolved to read the message. "I shall send it to Bob in the most convoluted way possible," expounded Alice further, "using a mixture of private and public channels as well as key information sent by trusted courier" Eve found this talk of exceptional complication extremely intriguing. Meanwhile, Bob got himself a sandwich. "It shall be ages yet before Alice sends me her message, for she must encode it in the most convoluted way possible. In addition, it is liable to be dull to read even once deciphered" thought Bob. "Secondly, deciphering it is going to be a headache." Therefore Bob made himself a cup of tea to go with his sandwich.

Via a complex series of disguises and the use of clever technology to sample information from allegedly secure channels, Eve recovered a fraction of the message and of the key. By applying all of her considerable intelligence and a hideous quantity of computational power, she was able to recover the plaintext, recode a message and pass it on to Bob as if nothing had happened. Only then did she actually read the plaintext. The message was this: "Eve, I love you, now stop hiding in my garden and come inside." And she did, and then there was hot cryptological loving information exchange.

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