Ron Rivest in the context of Turing Award

Alice and Bob are fictional characters commonly used as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic systems and protocols, and in other science and engineering literature where there are several participants in a thought experiment. The Alice and Bob characters were created by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman in their 1978 paper "A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-key Cryptosystems". Subsequently, they have become common archetypes in many scientific and engineering fields, such as quantum cryptography, game theory and physics. As the use of Alice and Bob became more widespread, additional characters were added, sometimes with particular meanings. These characters do not have to refer to people; they refer to generic agents which might be different computers or even different programs running on a single computer.

Adi Shamir (Hebrew: עדי שמיר; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science. In 2002, Ron Rivest, Len Adleman, and he won the ACM Turing Award.