Crypto Humor

On October 6, 2016, I presented a talk at the Rochester Security Summit titled "Common Developer Crypto Mistakes".

When I found out that my time slot was going to be the one right after lunch, I thought perhaps a little relevant humor would be good to help wake up the audience.

So, I did a bunch of research (okay, okay, this was way too much fun to qualify as “research”, but hey) and searched the Internet for jokes related to cryptography. (Using crypto-related cartoons / drawings—of which there are a lot more--was basically out because of my company's legal department's concern with potential copyright issues.)

The favorite joke that I found that I really wanted to use was this one, but since I was presenting the slides from a PDF slide deck, it was a bit hard to do without prematurely revealing the punch line:

Q: How many cryptographers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: ^T2u#�5�e|�Z�Lj�lz�jC#M

So instead, I ended up going with this joke:

I was going to start off by telling you a couple of good cryptography jokes, but unfortunately you can't tell the difference between them and random gibberish, so I decided against it.

Here are a few others that I found somewhat humorous that I was not able to fit into the prezo or considered ill-suited for the audience. You may or may not enjoy these, depending on how warped your sense of humor is and how much of a background in crypto you have:

Have you heard about the cryptographer who replaced his door with one that is 3 feet thick?

The lock on the old door could only take short keys.

Two hashes walk into a bar, one was a salted.

I was nearly arrested for SHA1 checksumming a doctor’s prescription. Luckily the hash was for medicinal purposes.

-- Ben Lynn blynn@cs.stanford.edu

I also ran across also this long(ish), but rather humorous discourse by John Gordon

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech

that you might enjoy.

And lastly, there's my email .sig that I've been using ever since the Snowden revelations:

NSA: All your crypto bit are belong to us.

which many people like, but I didn't use in the presentation because some also apparently find it offensive.

Anyhow, thanks for smiling!

-kevin