Understanding a Man in the Middle attack
A Man in the Middle (MITM) attack is an attack where an attacker both listens in on the transit traffic and changes it, trying to impersonate the receiver to the sender and the sender to the receiver.
Let’s demonstrate a possible attack for the scenario with Alice and Bob mentioned previously. Let’s suppose that Mallory acts as a Man in the Middle in order to recover the plaintext of the encrypted message that Alice wants to send to Bob. Then, the attack scenario will be as follows:
- Bob generates a keypair and sends his public key to Alice.
- Mallory generates her own keypair. She intercepts Bob’s public key sent to Alice and saves it for future use. Instead of Bob’s public key, Mallory sends her own public key to Alice, disguised as Bob’s key.
- Alice encrypts her message with Mallory’s public key, thinking that it is Bob’s public key. Alice then sends the encrypted message to...
