# Tag Info

15

These are completely different things: Man-in-the-middle is an active attack to a cryptographic protocol, where the attacker is, effectively, in between the communications of two users, and is capable of intercepting, relying, and (possibly) altering messages. In this case, the meaning of "in the middle" is direct: the attacker is in the middle of two ...

11

The solution is called onion routing; the gist of it is that there are a number of anonymising servers; when Alice wants to send a message to Bob, she picks a random route through a number of the servers; she then repeatedly encrypts the message for each hop, and sends the encrypted message (which states only the first hop in the clear) to the first server. ...

10

Short answer: Because the browser developers have long thought interoperability to be more important than security and standard compliance. Slightly longer answer: Some SSL/TLS server implementations do not negotiate the protocol version correctly, but terminate the connection with a fatal alert if the client attempts to negotiate a protocol version that ...

9

Annex E.1 of RFC 5246 contains the following text which is a nice summary of the situation: Note: some server implementations are known to implement version negotiation incorrectly. For example, there are buggy TLS 1.0 servers that simply close the connection when the client offers a version newer than TLS 1.0. Also, it is known that some servers will ...

7

For P2P authentication, you can go for web of trust concept. Simply this means, if someone is trusted by people you can trust, you can also trust that unknown person. In OpenPGP, a certificate can be signed by other users who trust the association of that public key with the person or entity listed in the certificate. So trust relationships can be propagated....

5

The protocol's description includes "Alice then encrypts $R_B$ with her private key". This has no standard meaning. Comments have clarified it is used an "RSA encryption scheme with proper padding" and I am taking as granted that encryption of $R_B$ using the private key half of $K_A$, denoted $K_A^-(R_B)$, is obtained by padding $R_B$ as in encryption, then ...

4

That was a bad edit to Wikipedia. The phrase "Carry-forward verification" is not a standard, well-known term in the cryptographic literature. It should not have been included in Wikipedia without a reference to something more specific. But oh well, no one is perfect, sometimes these things happen. Your request for an elaborate survey of MITM defence is ...

4

You may be interested in something like the Cryptographically Generated Address (CGA) from RFC 3972. CGA is used in Secure Neighbor Discovery Protocol (SEND) of RFC 3971 to bind a public key to an IPv6 address. The basic idea of CGA is to generate part of the IPv6 address by computing a cryptographic hash over the public key. The corresponding private key ...

4

Anonymity is indeed hard. How practical does it have to be? There's a trivial solution which is to broadcast everything. That way Carol can make correlations based on the time of messages but otherwise cannot know the destination of each message. The messages can be filtered by the recipient based on an encrypted destination identity that only they can ...

4

Diffie-Hellman (and variants such as ECDH) protect against passive eavesdroppers, but not (at least by themselves) against active man-in-the-middle attacks. An active MITM can substitute his own keys for Alice and Bob's keys during the initial exchange, something like this: Alice -> Bob (intercepted by Mallory): Hi Bob, I'm Alice and here's my public key: [...

3

The problem about Man-in-the-Middle attack on Diffie-Hellman is that both sides are not confident about other side's public key (g^a and g^b). If they were sure that they have correct public key of their's friend Man-in-the-Middle attack wouldn't be possible, because MITM attack is based on the forgery of public keys by adversary! If for instance Bob and ...

3

Well, as it says in your link the problem is authentication. So somehow Alice and Bob must set up an authenticated channel. One way of implementing such a channel is by Alice and Bob holding each others public verification key for a signature scheme. A CA would probably not hold a secret key for Alice and Bob. However, using a CA to get an authentic copy ...

3

A lot of modern cryptography is based on some mathematical assumptions and aims to achieve what is called Computational Security. That means that the adversary (Eve) could get some information about the plaintext with a negligible probability and the adversary is modeled as someone with bounded computational power, storage and bounded time. So all the (...

3

However, Eve has a copy of Alice's key pair and intercepted the outgoing message. She uses crypto_box_open and passes in pKb and sKa, the same keys that were used to encrypt the message. This yields the plain text message. She changes the message, re-encrypts it, and sends it on to Bob. As you correctly observed, Eve having Alice's private key is ...

3

Any shared secret can be used. Securely distributed passwords and symmetric keys, for example. Alternatively, you can use asymmetric cryptography, such as public keys. For one example, SSH has for years authenticated servers using public key cryptography and users typically using either public keys or passwords. Only recently had SSH added support for ...

3

It is secure against private key exposure but not against replay attacks by Eve. A three-way protocol avoids this, and doesn't need to use timestamps. The description below is from Delfs and Knebl's book Introduction to Cryptography. Each user, say Alice, has a key pair $(e_A, d_A)$ for encryption and another key pair $(s_A, v_A)$ for digital ...

3

TL;DR: Using words instead of strings / images may be a good solution for short, easy-to-verify codes and using locality / time dependent verification codes strengthens short hashes as would using password-hashes. Additionally to the improvements to comparability of the hash proposed by A. Toumantsev, I will propose three extra measures which I believe may ...

2

SSL offers protection against Man-in-the-Middle only if the client can make sure that what it believes to be the server's public key is, indeed, the true server's public key. X.509 certificates aim at providing this information, but this is relative that no rogue CA was involved. A "rogue CA" is here one of: An evil or gullible root CA ("subverted" CA ...

2

No. This does not help Eve the eavesdropper. AES is secure against known-plaintext attacks, so knowing that the same plaintext (kaes1) was encrypted under two different keys (k1 and k2) does not help her to recover any of the keys or break of the traffic. Of course, it still might not be a good idea to do what you suggested: there might be other reasons ...

2

I wouldn't consider voice or video to remain a secure means of identification for much longer. Advances in real-time video stream editing are near enough to reality that I wouldn't build a new security system on it. In the olden times in millennia past, you could have the computers on either end display a short MAC for both parties to alternate reading ...

2

Authentication without a central server (as trusted authority, e.g. root of a PKI) is a difficult task. The main question is, what actually defines the identity of a user and which information can be used to verify an identity claim. One idea would be to use digital signatures, where each user holds his own signing key and can verify himself by signing ...

2

Why are there exactly $m$ values for $k$? Well, assuming $k$ is the value of the shared secret that either Alice and Bob derive, well, that's not true; there are at most $m$ possible values, however it may be fewer. There will be exactly $m$ values if $g$ is a primitive root modulo $p$; however when we use Diffie-Hellman in practice, we generally avoid ...

2

Firstly, PKI makes use of a private key and a public key. The private key is known only to the user, while the public key is communicated securely via the use of certificates. To provide authentication and non-repudiation, users may sign a message with their private keys and obtain a digital signature. Any other users can verify that the signed signature is ...

2

in diffie-hellman key exchange algorithm vulnerability's is good defined by RSA lab : "The Diffie-Hellman key exchange is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. In this attack, an opponent Carol intercepts Alice's public value and sends her own public value to Bob. When Bob transmits his public value, Carol substitutes it with her own and sends it to ...

2

The reason Lamport's scheme is secure against a passive attacker is that even if they see $H^{n-1}(p)$ for a given $n$, the server would require the preimage of that hash, $H^{n-2}(p)$ on the next login. The active attack, in comparison, allows Trudy to find an earlier iteration than the server is expecting. That allows calculating several login hashes by ...

2

What you observed here is a "special" and "unusual" behavior of the NaCl interface in the way it handles the crypto_box. What the crypto_box does is basically perform a static Diffie-Hellman key-exchange (using your secret and the recipient's public key) between you and the receiver and derive keys from that. So you get the same symmetric encryption key for ...

2

First - please REALLY check the certificate, download it, open and have a look into details (4096 bit, 30y validity). I don't think your government wants to be insecure themselves (so other parties will act on behalf of it). If the certificate is to be used as a root (or issuing) certificate for other nationally issued certificates, you need it to be ...

1

The question Alex linked in comments explains why authentication works to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack on Diffie–Hellman. So, whenever you can do the key exchange in an authenticated channel, you can be sure there is no MitM attack. (Assuming DH problem remains unbroken, of course.) Now, your questions: Is one solution for both Alice and Bob ...

1

Aman Raj's solution has a major drawback because I think it's not safe. When a user (say A) generate a session key and encrypts it with his private key, then anyone can decrypt the session key by using A's public key (since the public key is public to all). Here is my solution which I have tried. Assume Alice and Bob wants to communicate and Trent is a ...

1

Server distribute respective private keys to A (PrivateKeyA) and B (PrivateKeyB) and stores their public keys (PublicKeyA and PublicKeyB) within it's database. Now any of the user (eg A) generates a random session key (K) and encrypts this key with its own private key (PrivateKeyA). Since server has public key of A, it can decrypt the encrypted session key. ...

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