Suspended animation in fiction which is indistinguishable from death. In American fiction, the first story to deal with suspended animation is the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. In the story, a British subject in the American colonies wanders into the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War, and finds a group of fairies, whose moonshine he drinks. He then falls asleep for 20 years, and returns to his village in what is now the United States, finding his home town
Rip van Winkle cipher Rip van Winkle cipher In cryptography, the Rip van Winkle cipher is a provably secure cipher with a finite key, assuming the attacker has only finite storage. The cipher requires a broadcaster (perhaps a numbers station) publicly transmitting a series of random numbers. The sender encrypts a plaintext message by XORing it with the random numbers, then holding it some length of time T. At the end of that time, the sender finally transmits the encrypted message. The receiver holds the random numbers the same length of time T. As soon as the receiver gets the encrypted message, he XORs