Hi, On July 25, 2003 01:45 pm, David Schwartz wrote: > Hijacks and redirects are all within the scope of what a MITM can do.
No, they only within the scope of what an attacker can do. The attacker becomes a MITM if they can do it without you knowing anything's wrong. Note "doing it without you knowing anything's wrong" means one of two things; one is to manipulate data in such a way that the end parties do not know that data has been changed (or created) in transit (authenticity), and the other is to be able to read the encapsulated data (secrecy). > You want a simple definition of a MITM? Here it is -- you think you > have: > > server <-> network <-> client > > But under a MITM attack, you really have: > > server <-> MITM <-> client > > The MITM can do anything he wants from his position, including pass > the data unmolested, drop bytes, or change them in both directions. > Hijacking and redirection all occur on the wire between the server and > the client, so they're all within the scope of a MITM attack. > > To put it simply, a MITM attack is any attack that can be performed by > someone who has complete control over the network between the server > and the client, that is, he is in the middle instead of a trusted > network. > > If you think MITM means something else, please present your > definition. I have a feeling you'll find it becomes incoherent. Your definition is a waste of time, I'm sorry to say. What you're saying leads logically to the trivial extreme that any network protocol passing through the internet is vulnerable to MITM attacks. If you're happy with that definition then this email thread is without point. SSL/TLS never claims that it can prevent active traffic manipulation by undesirable parties, it just claims you'll know something's wrong when and if it happens and that all data passing through the SSL/TLS streams until that point will be both tamper-free and secret. Our definition of MITM is any attack that could passively or actively attack the communications such that you are none the wiser (or that you may have lost confidentiality or authenticity of data prior to knowing something was wrong). FWIW: there are limited MITM possibilities in SSLv2 that fit your definition *and* ours, but that's a different issue. It seems that you are defining your statement to be correct and working backwards from there. The one true MITM attack seems to be this enormous email thread - consisting of one side working from a sensible definition of MITM towards conclusions, and another working from an tautological conclusion backwards towards an unreasonable definition of MITM. Cheers, Geoff -- Geoff Thorpe [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.geoffthorpe.net/ ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
