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MITM attacks

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (l.crypto@stewart.org)
Wed Oct 22 19:54:26 2003

X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Cc: l.crypto@stewart.org
From: l.crypto@stewart.org
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 19:59:16 -0400

Take many grains of salt before concluding that MITM attacks are either
hard or don't happen.

It is just that the environment for them is not the Internet per se, but
modern switched LANs.   The basic trick to monitoring someone's LAN traffic
is to convince the ARP machinery that the MITM MAC is associated with
the target's IP address, and then to forward the intercepted traffic to
the real MAC address.

This sort of thing is also one approach to getting into wireless lans.

So given switched LANs with wireless access points, (drive up access)
I would not be surprised at a rise in MITM attacks, even with
no crypto involved.

-Larry


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