Bruce Schneier Facts
Some readers of this blog may be aware of the Internet phenomenon of Chuck Norris Facts, which are various statements alleging the superhuman powers of Chuck Norris. For example: “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.” As with all bad Internet fads, this one has been copied and parodied many times. One that I find particularly amusing is the Bruce Schneier Facts. Bruce Schneier is a cryptographer who writes a very popular blog on security. So here’s some cryptography humour for you, with explanations for the non-cryptographers in the audience:
- Bruce Schneier is computationally infeasible. (We generally want cryptography problems to be computationally infeasible, meaning that it is extremely difficulty (infeasible) to compute a solution.)
- Bruce Schneier once factored a prime number. (A major problem in cryptography is being able to factor numbers. Prime numbers can’t be factored: their only divisors are 1 and themselves.)
- In a fight between Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, the winner would be Bruce Schneier. (Rivest and Shamir are two of the three inventors of the widely-used RSA cryptographic algorithm.)
