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

[Mallory Knodel <[e-mail]>]

On 22/09/2018 00:13, Nico Williams wrote:
> 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.

I agree with Mallory-in-the-middle if only because I have fun working in
tech with this name. But it doesn't solve the gender problem so much.

Others have mentioned machine-in-the-middle, which has always made the
most sense.

-Mallory


-- 
Mallory Knodel
Head of Digital :: article19.org
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