At 11:53 PM -0700 10/10/97, John Kelsey wrote:
This is *almost* right. We need to add one more thing, though:
1. Alice calls Mallory, thinking she's calling Bob. She reads the first three digits to him. He makes the connection fall apart. At the same time, Mallory calls Bob, pretending to be Alice, and causes the connection to fall apart at the same time.
John - You're absolutely right. I haven't had a phone connection fail after connect for a coon's age, but I remember the bad old days of living in GTE-land. (For example, the time I called my wife from work and she asked me to call Kristine and have her call because no one in Los Gatos could call out.) A comm failure during authentication should be enough reason to go to the next set of 16 words. N.B. I was assuming that Alice would only commit one digit to Bob before having Bob commit one digit to her. It seems from our analysis that doing it one digit at a time greatly improves the chances of catching Mallory early. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Internal surveillance | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | helped make the USSR the | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | nation it is today. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA