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 gpg fingerprint :: E3EB 63E0 65A3 B240 BCD9 B071 0C32 A271 BD3C C780
