Names in Cryptography

• Two communicating parties are referred to as Alice and Bob. This makes it easier to identify the communicating parties. If there is a third and fourth party to the communication, they will be referred to as Carol and Dave.
• A malicious party is referred to as Mallory
• An eavesdropper as Eve
• A trusted third party as Trent

These kinds of names are referred to as Metasyntactic Variables.