Re: Mallory-in-the-middle attacks (Re: SV: Diversity and offensive terminology in RFCs)

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 02:18:29PM -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 12:09:06PM +0000, Anne-Marie Eklund-Löwinder wrote:
> > Some time ago we had a standardisation committee in Sweden, running a
> > project defining the terminology in Swedish for the information
> > security area. They came up with Janus-attack rather than man in the
> > middle-attack (the latter sounds weird in Swedish).
> 
> But it's always *Mallory* who gets in the middle, so I'd call it a
> Mallory-in-the-middle attack, which has the very nice property of
> abbreviating to MITM, thus minimizing the change to that term of art.

As it happens, one of the HRPC co-chairs is named Mallory (Knodel).
Just to clarify I was not referring to Mallory Knodel but to the
fictional character Mallory of Alice-and-Bob fame, you know, the
characters we use in expositions of cryptographic protocols and their
analyses, the full cast of which you can see in the following page:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

Any resemblance to real persons must have been an accident, and anyways,
not mine.  I hope we don't have to rename these fictional characters.

Nico
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