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Encyclopedia > Spoofing attack

In the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage. Network security consists of the provisions made in an underlying computer network infrastructure, policies adopted by the network administrator to protect the network and the network-accessible resources from unauthorized access and the effectiveness (or lack) of these measures combined together. ...

Contents

Man-in-the-middle attack and internet protocol spoofing

An example from cryptography is the man-in-the-middle attack, in which an attacker spoofs Alice into believing they're Bob, and spoofs Bob into believing they're Alice, thus gaining access to all messages in both directions without the trouble of any cryptanalytic effort. The German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II for encryption of very high-level general staff messages Cryptography (or cryptology; derived from Greek κρυπτός kryptós hidden, and the verb γράφω gráfo write or λεγειν legein to speak) is the study of message secrecy. ... It has been suggested that Mafia Fraud Attack be merged into this article or section. ... The names Alice and Bob are commonly used placeholders for archetypal characters in fields such as cryptography and physics. ... The names Alice and Bob are commonly used placeholders for archetypal characters in fields such as cryptography and physics. ... Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, hidden, and analýein, to loosen or to untie) is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. ...


The attacker must monitor the packets sent from Alice to Bob and then guess the sequence number of the packets. Then the attacker knocks out Alice with a SYN attack and injects his own packets, claiming to have the address of Alice. Alice's firewall can defend against some spoof attacks when it has been configured with knowledge of all the IP addresses connected to each of its interfaces. It can then detect a spoofed packet if it arrives at an interface that is not known to be connected to the IP address. A SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack in which an attacker sends a succession of SYN requests to a targets system. ... This article is about the network security device. ...


Many carelessly designed protocols are subject to spoof attacks, including many of those used on the Internet. See Internet protocol spoofing In computer networking, the term Internet Protocol spoofing (IP spoofing) is the creation of IP packets with a forged (spoofed) source IP address. ...


URL spoofing and phishing

Another kind of spoofing is "webpage spoofing," also known as phishing. In this attack, a legitimate web page such as a bank's site is reproduced in "look and feel" on another server under control of the attacker. The intent is to fool the users into thinking that they are connected to a trusted site, for instance to harvest user names and passwords. An example of a phishing email, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank. ...


This attack is often performed with the aid of URL spoofing, which exploits web browser bugs in order to display incorrect URLs in the browsers location bar; or with DNS cache poisoning in order to direct the user away from the legitimate site and to the fake one. Once the user puts in their password, the attack-code reports a password error, then redirects the user back to the legitimate site. A Spoofed URL describes one website that poses as another. ... An example of a Web browser (Mozilla Firefox) A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. ... // Uniform Resource Locator (URL) formerly known as Universal Resource Locator, is a technical, Web-related term used in two distinct meanings: In popular usage and many technical documents, it is a synonym for Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); Strictly, the idea of a uniform syntax for global identifiers of network-retrievable... DNS cache poisoning is a technique that tricks a DNS server into believing it has received authentic information when, in reality, it has not. ...


Referer spoofing

Some websites, especially pornographic paysites, allow access to their materials only from certain approved (login-) pages. This is enforced by checking the Referer header of the HTTP request. This referer header however can be changed (known as "Referer spoofing" or "Ref-tar spoofing"), allowing users to gain unauthorized access to the materials. A paysite, in pornography slang, is a pornographic website that charges money for admission, unlike free sites such as TGPs. ... Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer; so common, in fact, that it made it into the official specification of HTTP - the communication protocol of the world wide web. ... HTTP (for HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. ... In computer security, Referer spoofing or ref tar spoofing is the sending of incorrect Referer information along with an HTTP request, with the aim of gaining unauthorized access to a web site. ...


Poisoning of file-sharing networks

"Spoofing" can also refer to copyright holders placing distorted or unlistenable versions of works on file-sharing networks, to discourage downloading from these sources. Not to be confused with copywriting. ... See Shared resource for the conventional meaning of file sharing File sharing is the practice of making files available for other users to download over the Internet and smaller networks. ...


Caller ID spoofing

In public telephone networks, it has for a long while been possible to find out who is calling you by looking at the Caller ID information that is transmitted with the call. There are technologies that transmit this information on landlines, on cellphones and also with VoIP. Unfortunately, there are now technologies (especially associated with VoIP) that allow callers to lie about their identity, and present false names and numbers, which could of course be used as a tool to defraud or harass. Because there are services and gateways that interconnect VoIP with other public phone networks, these false Caller IDs can be transmitted to any phone on the planet. Due to the distributed geographic nature of the Internet, VoIP calls can be generated in a different country to the receiver, which means that it is very difficult to have a legal framework to control those who would use fake Caller IDs as part of a scam. Cellular redirects here. ... IP Telephony, also called Internet telephony, is the technology that makes it possible to have a telephone conversation over the Internet or a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. ... A confidence trick, confidence game, or con for short, (also known as a scam) is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the mark) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. ...


E-mail address spoofing

Main article: E-mail spoofing

The sender information shown in e-mails (the "From" field) can be spoofed easily, though nowadays many domains have the Sender Policy Framework implemented, which helps prevent the e-mail spoofing. This technique is commonly used by Spammers to hide the origin of their e-mails and leads to problems such as misdirected bounces (i.e. e-mail spam backscatter). The spammers use a reliable "From" e-mail address so that they gain trust and authority, yet if the possible victim replies, the reply will be delivered to the spammer's e-mail address and not to the e-mail available on "From": reliable e-mail used in spoofing “Spoofing” is a term used to describe fraudulent email activity in which the IP address of the original sender is changed to appear as if it originated from a different IP address. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... In computing, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an extension to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). ... E-mail spam, also known as bulk e-mail or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. ... A bounce message, or Delivery Status Notification (DSN) message or, simply, a bounce is an automated electronic mail message from a mail system informing the sender of another message about a delivery problem. ... Backscatter is the reflection of waves, particles, or signals back to the direction they came from. ...


Login spoofing

Main article: Login spoofing

The user is presented with an ordinary looking login prompt for username and password, which is actually a malicious program under the control of the attacker. Login spoofing is a technique used to obtain a users password. ...


References

  • "Pirates of the Digital Millennium" by John Gantz & Jack B. Rochester, 2005, FT Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458; ISBN 0-13-146315-2.
  • http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/caller_id_spoof.html

See also

Protocol spoofing is used in data communications to improve performance in situations where an existing protocol is inadequate, for example due to long delays or high error rates. ... Stream ciphers where plaintext bits are combined with a cipher bit stream by an exclusive-or operation (xor) can be very secure if used properly. ...

External links

  • Web Spoofing
  • Blog About Caller ID Spoofing

  Results from FactBites:
 
IDN homograph attack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (830 words)
The internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack is a means by which a malicious party may seek to deceive computer users about what remote system they are communicating with, by exploiting the fact that many different characters may have nearly (or wholly) indistinguishable glyphs.
Spoofing attacks based on these similarities are known as homograph spoofing attacks.
In a typical example of a hypothetical attack, someone could register a domain name that appears identical to an existing domain but goes somewhere else.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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