19.5 Attacks on cryptographic protocols
Recall from Chapter 2 Secure Channel and the CIA Triad, that a cryptographic protocol is a distributed algorithm defined by a sequence of steps precisely specifying the actions required of two or more entities to achieve a specific cryptographic goal [117].
Attacks on cryptographic protocols typically do not attack the cryptographic primitives they are built of, but the sequence of messages making up the protocol. An attack on a protocol is considered successful if any of the cryptographic goals of the protocol (confidentiality, entity authenticity, or message authenticity) are endangered.
19.5.1 Impersonation attacks
An impersonation attack is any deception attempt where Mallory claims to be another entity, say, Bob. What Mallory technically does to trick Alice into believing she is talking to Bob depends on the technical solution used by Alice to verify the identity of her communication peers. Popular examples of such mechanisms, which...