Is Meet-in-the-Middle attack normally abbreviated MITM?

Question

The Meet-in-the-middle attack article on Wikipedia gives MITM as the abbreviation for Meet-in-the-middle attack. I'm seriously hoping this is just Wikipedia being weird, and isn't actually common usage, because MITM is also used for the oft-mentioned Man-in-the-Middle attack/technique (because sometimes the "man" in the middle is also you).

So is this actually common in general, common in works specifically about Meet-in-the-Middle attacks, or what?

References would be greatly appreciated, if possible.

Answer 1

Meet-in-the-Middle attack is commonly abbreviated MitM or MITM in the context of attacks on block ciphers, permutations, and hashes, as demonstrated by a Google query for MITM on the IACR website, which returns several examples with MitM in the title of the paper, and the context makes it clear that's for Meet-in-the-Middle.

For an audience able to understand the matters, there is no risk of confusion between Meet-in-the-Middle and Man-in-the-Middle attacks. And it's rare the two coexist (I can only think of a list of attacks, or a dictionary).

Whatever the audience, it's best to write "Meet-in-the-Middle (MitM)" early on. The three articles linked above do that, or some close variation.

Answer 2

A comment on the question already points out that acronym collisions are not uncommon. As a field obsessed with collision resistance, we aren't too bad at keeping these collisions low within the field, but they still occur and are even more likely to occur with other fields outside of crypto/security/cs. So here are a few examples.

• MITM: Indeed, it stands for both Meet-in-The-Middle and Man-In-the-Middle (btw, the latter is sometimes refered to as PITM as well)
• Sigma protocol: A class of 3 moves zero knowledge and the family of Authenticated Key Exchange protocols (SIGn then Mac)
• DLP: discrete logarithm problem and Data Loss Prevention
• BLS: the Boneh–Lynn–Shacham pairing-based signature scheme and also the Barreto–Lynn-Scott (BLS) family of paring friendly curves.

There are other funny collisions with fields outside of crypto. My favorite:

PRF vs PRP: Fundamental primitives of symmetric crypto, Indistinguishable up to the birthday bound. This is also different choices of skin and hair rejuvenation treatment. Ask your doctor what is right for you!