19.3 Local versus remote attacks
Geographic constraints imposed on the attacker form the second fundamental attack characteristic in practical cryptography and information security.Figure 19.3 shows a local attack where Mallory needs to be co-located with Bob. What the term co-located exactly means depends on the specific attack.
Figure 19.3: Local attack
In some cases, the term co-located refers to Mallory residing on the same machine. As an example, imagine an attack where Mallory tries to steal Bob’s password from the password file stored on a machine running a Linux operating system that is not connected to the internet. An example might be a machine in a factory. To perform such an attack, Mallory must be logged in on the same system like Bob and therefore must be able to get into the vicinity of that system.
In other cases, a local attack may require Mallory to be connected to the same local network as Bob. If Bob’s machines on his computer network trust...