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 it with the random numbers he remembers were transmitted T ago, to recover the original plaintext message. The delay T represents the "key" and must be securely communicated only once. Ueli Maurer says the original Rip van Winkle cipher is completely impractical, but it motivated a new approach to provable security. J.L. Massey and I. Ingemarsson. "The Rip van Winkle cipher - a simple and provably computationally secure cipher with a finite key." In Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Information Theory (Abstracts), page 146, 1985. Rip van Winkle cipher In cryptography, the Rip van Winkle cipher is a provably secure cipher