Gambling with Secrets: Part 1/8 (What is Cryptography?)

Cryptographers use Alice and Bob as names for legitimate communicating parties, while Eve represents an eavesdropper attempting to intercept their messages, establishing a standard framework for analyzing secure communication protocols.

Cryptography evolved from practitioners developing secret codes through intuition and trial into mathematicians and computer scientists applying rigorous probability theory and number theory to prove security guarantees.

Alice faces the fundamental cryptographic bootstrap dilemma when needing to establish a secret code with Bob while Eve monitors all communication channels, creating a circular dependency that stumped cryptographers for centuries.