5 ms·

It has to do with the history of using names like Alice and Bob in cryptography, and nothing to do within your suggested reason.

gnull 4y ago
You mean calling the adversary Mallory? Yes, this is standard. The term mallory-in-the-middle is not, as you can confirm with one Google search. There's barely anyone using this term, and nobody was using it 4 years ago. At first, I thought that Mallory-in-the-middle was some special type of man-in-the-middle attack. In crypto, Mallory is a very specific type of adversary (active one, I think).
- Retr0id 4y ago
  While Mallory-in-the-middle is certainly less-common as a term, Mallory is most strongly associated with active-MitM examples, and vice-versa.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > There's barely anyone using this term, and nobody was using it 4 years ago. At my employer (security consultancy in Germany), we switched ~two weeks ago from "man" in the middle to "machine" in the middle as expansion for the MITM acronym. Mallory is also a good option, although more known to cryptographers than our mainly developer audience (who might have more of an idea what a machine is than a Mallory). It's all not perfect but we're figuring this out. Yes, neutral gender writing is indeed relatively new and won't be much on web searches. Apparently some others use AiTM for attacker in the middle (yes, with that capitalization), which most people hated and voted against (because capitalizing the The but not the in looks dumb and, also, everyone already knows mitm so that change harms readability even more). It'll be a while before the community settles on something and "man" is not the most commonly known one. Bear with us until then!
  - gnull 4y ago
    > which most people hated and voted against Was there voting about these things? Who got invited to vote?
    - lucb1e 4y ago
      People just speak out for or against things in the chat. Manner of speaking, not an official ballot voting system. And to be clear, nobody was against being more gender neutral, just in favor of machine in the middle over attacker in the middle.
      - gnull 4y ago
        I'm not saying this way of gathering people's opinions is completely useless, but it has big flaws. Being against this sort of feminist initiatives can get you labeled all sorts of things in the best case, and cancelled in the worst case. It's like making a poll in Russia about whether citizens support the invasion of Ukraine or not, when saying you don't like it is a criminal offense that can get you in jail. "I just went out and asked some people on the streets of Moscow whether they support bombing of Ukraine, nobody said no while a couple of them said yes, so they must really like that."
        lucb1e 4y ago
        This change wasn't an organised discussion but casually came up while writing a report: the writer changed the acronyms template text (for this report) from MITM to AiTM, he let the team know and asked whether the upstream (company-wide) template should be changed also. That sparked alternative suggestions like Machine instead of Attacker and we ended up going with that. It wasn't intended to be formal and vote-like. I'm not sure setting up an anonymous vote (on some third party system to avoid being able to see server logs) is feasible every time something like this comes up. How would you say we could do better? I'm definitely open for ideas if there are feasible methods. (And if it's not a "feasible" method for this one-off, then it might still be a good thing for more general / organised opinion gathering.)
  - 4y ago
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Most MITM attacks that we care about are active attacks (hence Mallory.) An eavesdropper-in-the-middle attack would just be the standard attack setting, not an MITM. For those who are experts the term is “MITM” and I don’t care what the first M stands for.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Mallory is used to refer to active network exploitation (as opposed to Eve, who is passive). "Mallory-in-the-middle" is a great term that actually makes the attacker capabilities more clear and should already be understood by people with relevant context. The default "let's remove gendered terms" approach would be "person-in-the-middle."

gnull 4y ago

You mean calling the adversary Mallory? Yes, this is standard. The term mallory-in-the-middle is not, as you can confirm with one Google search. There's barely anyone using this term, and nobody was using it 4 years ago. At first, I thought that Mallory-in-the-middle was some special type of man-in-the-middle attack. In crypto, Mallory is a very specific type of adversary (active one, I think).

Retr0id 4y ago
While Mallory-in-the-middle is certainly less-common as a term, Mallory is most strongly associated with active-MitM examples, and vice-versa.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lucb1e 4y ago
> There's barely anyone using this term, and nobody was using it 4 years ago. At my employer (security consultancy in Germany), we switched ~two weeks ago from "man" in the middle to "machine" in the middle as expansion for the MITM acronym. Mallory is also a good option, although more known to cryptographers than our mainly developer audience (who might have more of an idea what a machine is than a Mallory). It's all not perfect but we're figuring this out. Yes, neutral gender writing is indeed relatively new and won't be much on web searches. Apparently some others use AiTM for attacker in the middle (yes, with that capitalization), which most people hated and voted against (because capitalizing the The but not the in looks dumb and, also, everyone already knows mitm so that change harms readability even more). It'll be a while before the community settles on something and "man" is not the most commonly known one. Bear with us until then!
- gnull 4y ago
  > which most people hated and voted against Was there voting about these things? Who got invited to vote?
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    People just speak out for or against things in the chat. Manner of speaking, not an official ballot voting system. And to be clear, nobody was against being more gender neutral, just in favor of machine in the middle over attacker in the middle.
    - gnull 4y ago
      I'm not saying this way of gathering people's opinions is completely useless, but it has big flaws. Being against this sort of feminist initiatives can get you labeled all sorts of things in the best case, and cancelled in the worst case. It's like making a poll in Russia about whether citizens support the invasion of Ukraine or not, when saying you don't like it is a criminal offense that can get you in jail. "I just went out and asked some people on the streets of Moscow whether they support bombing of Ukraine, nobody said no while a couple of them said yes, so they must really like that."
      - lucb1e 4y ago
        This change wasn't an organised discussion but casually came up while writing a report: the writer changed the acronyms template text (for this report) from MITM to AiTM, he let the team know and asked whether the upstream (company-wide) template should be changed also. That sparked alternative suggestions like Machine instead of Attacker and we ended up going with that. It wasn't intended to be formal and vote-like. I'm not sure setting up an anonymous vote (on some third party system to avoid being able to see server logs) is feasible every time something like this comes up. How would you say we could do better? I'm definitely open for ideas if there are feasible methods. (And if it's not a "feasible" method for this one-off, then it might still be a good thing for more general / organised opinion gathering.)
- 4y ago
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Most MITM attacks that we care about are active attacks (hence Mallory.) An eavesdropper-in-the-middle attack would just be the standard attack setting, not an MITM. For those who are experts the term is “MITM” and I don’t care what the first M stands for.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Mallory is used to refer to active network exploitation (as opposed to Eve, who is passive). "Mallory-in-the-middle" is a great term that actually makes the attacker capabilities more clear and should already be understood by people with relevant context. The default "let's remove gendered terms" approach would be "person-in-the-middle."