MITM (Man in the middle) attack Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

MITM (Man in the middle) attack - Essay Example The other names for MITM attack are fire brigade, Bucket Brigade, monkey-in-the –middle, TCP hijacking, session hijacking, and TCP session hijacking (Bhatia, 2008) Man-in-the-middle attack can be successful only when the attacker has the ability to impersonate each of the two endpoints to the others satisfaction. Most of the cryptographic protocols involve certain forms of authentication that is designed specifically to prevent the MITM attack. An example of an MITM attack that is successful against the public key encryption is as follows: In  an MITM (Man-in-the-Middle) attack, the intruder or an attacker inserts or puts himself between notes of two networks. E.g., considering a successful attack, if a packet is sent to Alice by John, the packet sent passes through or branches through the attacker or intruder Jane first and Jane decides after getting it to forward it to the recipient Alice with modifications or without any; upon receiving the packet, Alice thinks that it come from John. The attack i.e. MITM is bidirectional, hence the same process applies upon Alice sending a packet to John (Samah, et al, 2008) The available techniques for preventing an MITM attack are authentication techniques based on second or secure channel verification, passwords and secret keys, which are strong and secure authentication, latency examination, one-time pads, and carry-forward verification. Secret keys are high information entropy secrets hence more secure while passwords are low information entropy secrets, which are less secure (Stewart, 2008). Long or Extended calculations of Cryptographic hash function, which is a latency examination lead into few seconds and incase both involved parties take twenty seconds, the third party can be indicated since the calculation take sixty seconds to reach to each involved party. One-time pads are resistant or immune to MITM (man-in-the-middle)