Re: [core] AD review of draft-ietf-core-echo-request-tag-10

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-09-01, at 16:19, Göran Selander <goran.selander=[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
>    — Section 3.5.1 —
> 
>       is still possible for a man-in-the-middle to maliciously replace a
>       later operation's blocks with an earlier operation's blocks
> 
>    Not a requirement here, and I will accept your best judgment:  in the
>    spirit of recent discussion on inclusive vs exclusionary language, I ask
>    you to consider changing “a man-in-the-middle” to “an on-path attacker”.
> 
> [GS] I thought there was a slight difference between "on-path attacker" and "man-in-the-middle”, in that the latter has access to the message flow whereas the former need not have. For example, an on-path attacker may only be able to inject messages. In this case ("replace") the latter would then be more precise. If I'm right then I propose we use available distinctions pending a new dictionary, otherwise I'm fine with changing.

Oh, so we are getting to have this fun discussion on *this* draft.

A MITM can read, inject, delete, and modify data.

An on-path attacker can read and inject, but not necessarily delete or modify data.

I would not use the latter as a synonym for the former.

The other proposal in https://github.com/ietf/terminology is even more broken: An impersonation attacker doesn’t even have to be on-path.

(See also my comment on https://github.com/ietf/terminology/pull/1, which fell by the wayside in the recent lull on this topic.)

In the mid-2000s, there was an attempt to replace MITM attack by “middleperson attack”.  That utterly failed, a simple Google search says “man-in-the-middle” (54100 hits on dl.acm.org) is overwhelmingly still the term of art and not “middleperson” (31 hits on dl.acm.org).

Wikipedia at least knows about the other established word for MITM, Janus attack https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Janus_attack&redirect=no — not very successful either (9 hits on dl.acm.org).

One word that already has the right semantics and does not require the cultural background of “Janus attack” is “Interposer attack”.  0 hits on dl.acm.org, but has all the right properties.  So in the above we would replace MITM by “interposer”:

>       is still possible for an interposer to maliciously replace a
>       later operation's blocks with an earlier operation's blocks

WFM, even if this is blazing a new trail.

Grüße, Carsten