Related Concepts
Definition
An adversarial computer between two computers pretending to one to be the other.
Theory
The man-in-the-middle attack is a very old attack that has been used against a wide range of protocols, going from login protocols, entity authentication protocols, etc.
To illustrate, consider Secure Socket Layer (SSL), used to protect the privacy and authenticity of WWW traffic. Current Public Key Infrastructures are either nonexistent or have very poor security, if any (for an incident example, see [5]). This implies that a man-in-the-middle can be launched as following. Suppose Alice wants to have a secure WWW connection to Bob’s WWW page. When Eve is between Alice and Bob, Eve will pretend that her made-up public key is the one of Bob. So, when Alice accepts the fake certificate, she is in fact sending information to Eve. Eve can then start an SSL connection with the real WWW page of Bob. Even though encryption and authentication is...
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Bart J (2011) Cars with keyless entry fall prey to antenna hack. http://hothardware.com/News/Cars%2Dwith%2Dkeyless%2Dentry%2Dfall%2Dpre%y%2Dto%2Dantenna%2Dhack/, 11 January, 2011
Bengio S, Brassard G, Desmedt YG, Goutier C, Quisquater J-J (1991) Secure implementations of identification systems. J Cryptol 4(3):175–183
Beth T, Desmedt Y (1991) Identification tokens or: solving the chess grandmaster problem. In: Menezes AJ, Vanstone SA (eds) Advances in cryptology — crypto ’90, proceedings. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 537. Springer, Santa Barbara, 11–15 August 1991, pp 169–176
Brands S, Chaum D (1994) Distance-bounding protocols. In: Helleseth T (ed) Advances in cryptology — eurocrypt ’93, proceedings. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 765. Springer, Lofthus, May 1993, pp 344–359
Erroneous verisign-issued digital certificates pose spoofing hazard. Updated: June 23, 2003, Microsoft security bulletin MS01-017, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-017.asp, 22 March, 2001
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Desmedt, Y. (2011). Man-in-the-Middle Attack. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_324
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