A Simplified Defense Mechanism Against Man-In-The-Middle Attacks

Abstract - Using the Man-In-The-Middle attack the attacker tries to intercept / modify / change or replace the data being exchanged with false information. At times the attacker tries to inject commands and even force the victims system to downgrade some of the running services so that the target system can be easily exploited using different techniques. The basic concept behind "Man-in-the-middle attack" (MITM attack) is to intrude into the existing communication between the endpoints on a network and intercept the data transferred between them and change the actual contents or inject false information. The purpose of this document is to spread the awareness about the MITM attacks that are seen in the real time scenario. The initial sections discuss the different types of attacks that can be launched under the MITM category. It also gives a general idea of how the attackers can launch different types of downgrading of services attacks on the victim machine so that further exploitation of the victim becomes easier. Some of the commonly used techniques and tools that are used by the attackers are also mentioned herein. Finally the document discusses some of the different countermeasures that are being used to avoid the MITM attacks. Although several technologies employing different levels of complexity are used these days, we hereby suggest some simple and effective measures that can be used to simplify the user authentication process and assure the identity of the communicating partners using simple basic individual identifiers.