Vote for your favorite name
Some people complained that my last post contained too much text… I’ll make this shorter :-)
A week ago I asked you to help me find a name for a project I am working on. The project is a library of tools for writing secure multi-party computations in Python, and thus I have been calling it PySMPC until now. But since the project might one day be rewritten in another language, I would prefer to have another name.
Tord, Dan and Chris suggested new names, and including the ones I had come up with myself, we now have (in alphabetical order):
- AMPC: Asynchronous Multi-Party Computation, 1 vote
- AntiTrust
- DTTP: Distributed Trusted Third Party, 1 vote
- Jokke: no idea what that would mean, but Rune votes for it. 1 vote
- NoTrent
- NoTTP: No Trusted Third Party
- NoTrust
- PEBLE: Paranoid Economy Benchmarking Liability Elimination
- SMPC: Secure Multi-Party Computation, 2 votes
- smpacman: secure multi-party comp. manager, 1 vote
- Trent
- VIFF: Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework, 3 votes (give or take an ∞ or two…)
Please vote for your favorite name (multiple votes are okay) by leaving a comment.
Martin Geisler:
I’ll start the vote — I like the names VIFF, AMPC, SMPC, and DTTP the most.
14 October 2007, 9:25 pmMikkel:
Honestly I think more than one of the names above imply something about the framework which is maybe not completely wrong, but simply inaccurate. Take PEBLE for example, it’s a completely wacky name, and “Paranoid Economy Benchmarking Liability Elimination”? Totally over the top, and it suggests that your framework is built specifically for that purpose, while it can do so much more! And what’s even worse, the real English word is spelled pebble :)
My clear favorite is VIFF - it’s not an ideal functionality, but it’s virtually the same (which so beautifully fits how we actually prove security of these things!) and it’s short and catchy. I just hope nobody gets confused and thinks it’s the Vancouver International Film Festival…
14 October 2007, 11:11 pmMartin Geisler:
I like VIFF too for exactly the reason you give. Even though VIFF is “taken” by the film festival at the moment, I think the Internet is big enough that we can reuse the name. Especially when the two projects are so far apart as they are in this case.
15 October 2007, 6:55 amRune:
A four letter name will obviously be a favorite. I also vote for VIFF (mostly because it’s the only one I can pronounce) for the same reasons that Mikkel “bla bla”’s about.
15 October 2007, 10:05 amOle Laursen:
My suggestion is “smpacman”… (secure multi-party comp. manager). Of course, you’d need to write it like S/M-Pacman and tell people it’s not just a game, it’s serious stuff for adults.
Otherwise, Viff sounds cool although I think it’s a bit hard to get the idea of the acronym if you’re not doing cryptography proofs for a living.
15 October 2007, 10:10 amMartin Geisler:
Ole, thanks for stopping by and suggesting that I name my very serious, for-grown-ups-only cryptographic library after a video game :-) Let’s see if it gets any votes…
15 October 2007, 12:10 pmMikkel:
I hereby place infinity PLUS ONE votes for VIFF.
15 October 2007, 12:19 pmMartin Geisler:
Hmm… are you trying to sabotage my vote?!
15 October 2007, 12:23 pmMikkel:
No. You told me I could place as many votes as I’d like. You didn’t even tell me that it had to be a natural number.
15 October 2007, 1:48 pmT ordr:
First a comment, I would never look at VIFF if I was searching for Multi-party computation. My vote goes to SMPC.
Since Mikkel has started by sabotaging your vote and you have allowed it, I thought I would have some fun. As you have allowed an infinity number of votes to VIFF, there should not be anything wrong with giving minus infinity votes to VIFF. Only that Mikkel was probably using the infinity over natural numbers. I am using the minus infinity over real numbers, thereby adding more to minus infinity than Mikkels infinity, thereby giving so much minus infinity to VIFF that it is removed from the competition.
15 October 2007, 2:04 pm(This comment is an obvious flamebate for an infinity discussion)
Martin Geisler:
I’ll count that as a -1 vote for VIFF… your minus infinity cancels his plus infinity, and then we’re back on track :-)
Don’t you think VIFF could work if the page talked lots about how VIFF can be used to implement SMPC? I’m sure Google would find the page just fine.
What I don’t like about SMPC is that it seems “bare” without anything added to it. I started with PySMCP for that reason, meaning “SMPC in Python”, just like the many other PyFoo packages around which all do Foo in Python. I think it should at least be called something like “The SMCP Framework”, “libsmpc” or something along those lines.
15 October 2007, 2:19 pmMikkel:
Well Tord, I’ll bite. It’s the same damn infinity! And as you should know, infinity minus infinity is undefined. Ok apparently, not everyone one knows this. Sorry Martin :)
The correct number of votes for VIFF should now be “undefined”.
15 October 2007, 2:22 pmMartin Geisler:
I’ve now bought http://viff.dk/ for the project, so unless someone steps forward and explains that “VIFF” means something bad in his/her language, then I’ll go with that name.
Thanks a lot for the help everybody!
16 October 2007, 7:04 amChris:
http://www.criviff.qc.ca/
16 October 2007, 8:15 amWell “Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire
sur la violence familiale et la violence
faite aux femmes” is already pretty bad…
Martin Geisler:
Hmm, how did you dig that one up? :-) When I search for “VIFF” in google.com, then I see stuff about a Vancouver and Vietnamese film festival, something about an image format called VIFF, and finally something about vectoring in forward flight…
16 October 2007, 9:33 amThomas:
I vote for calling it “john”
16 October 2007, 6:56 pmDina:
Is it possible to vote without revealing any information? …and if so, can you prove it safe to do so?
30 October 2007, 4:15 pm/Dina
Martin Geisler:
You are right, I ought to implement a secure vote using my system :-)
But it’s too late now — the world will have to get used to VIFF, mwahahaha! :-D
30 October 2007, 4:38 pm