Unavoidable man in the middle attack. Man-in-the-middle attack. In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle attack (often abbreviated to MITM, MitM, MIM, MiM or MITMA) is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other. One example is active eavesdropping, in which the attacker makes independent connections with the victims and relays messages between them to make them believe they are talking directly to each other over a private connection, when in fact the entire conversation is controlled by the attacker.
The attacker must be able to intercept all relevant messages passing between the two victims and inject new ones. This is straightforward in many circumstances; for example, an attacker within reception range of an unencrypted Wi-Fi wireless access point, can insert himself as a man-in-the-middle.[1] Example of an attack[edit] Illustration of man-in-the-middle attack. Suppose Alice wishes to communicate with Bob. 1. How Safe is SSL from MITM (Man In The Middle) Attacks? Website Technology Issues forum at WebmasterWorld. The topic of SSL security on an unsecured wifi connection was brought up on on the thread about How to Secure Wordpress Sites [webmasterworld.com] and it seemed there was enough FUD swirling around this topic to start a new thread.
This is intended to be educational for those that think SSL-MITM isn't possible so don't shoot the messenger as this is an educational and informative post. I'm not trying to show anyone how to launch a MITM attack, or give away all the steps required to sniff SSL. Besides, there's no need to do this because all of this information is freely available all over the internet with a simple query. From the WordPress thread mentioned above: If you can establish yourself as the MITM (Man in the Middle) you only need to dnsspoof the destination and issue a fake SSL cert as a response to the victim and then you can use SSLDUMP to decrypt the SSL stream.
Wow, that was hard wasn't it? Let's do a simple diagram of how that works: The big challenge is getting in the middle. Session management. Temporary context for interactive information interchange In computer science and networking in particular, a session is a time-delimited two-way link, a practical (relatively high) layer in the TCP/IP protocol enabling interactive expression and information exchange between two or more communication devices or ends – be they computers, automated systems, or live active users (see login session).
A session is established at a certain point in time, and then ‘torn down’ - brought to an end - at some later point. An established communication session may involve more than one message in each direction. A session is typically stateful, meaning that at least one of the communicating parties needs to hold current state information and save information about the session history to be able to communicate, as opposed to stateless communication, where the communication consists of independent requests with responses. Software implementation [edit] Server-side web sessions Client-side web sessions. How to Create Totally Secure Cookies. Securing cookies and sessions is vital to keeping an application secure. Many tutorials have been written on the subject, but as the internet (and browsers loading it) evolve so do the methods you can use to keep your application secure.
In this article we’re going to break down the various components of a cookie and what they mean for security. This will include limiting the cookie to certain domains and paths on those domains, choosing what information to store, and protecting the cookie from cross site scripting exploits. In a second article we will go into more depth in how to protect everyone’s favorite cookie, the session ID. How Cookies Work Cookies are simply key/value pairs that let us get around HTTP being a stateless protocol. When the server wants to set a cookie it passes back a header named “Set-Cookie” with the key-value pair and some options. On subsequent requests the client will send along its own header to let the server know the name and value of its stored cookies.
Geek to Live: Encrypt your web browsing session (with an SSH SOCKS proxy) FireSSH is a Browser Based SSH Client Written Entirely In Javascript.