An Effective Protection Mechanism for SSL Man-in-the-Middle Proxy Attacks

In current e-commerce system, it happens that client's confidential information such as credit card numbers, pin numbers, or digital certificate may pass through a web proxy server or an altered proxy server without client's awareness. Even though the confidential information is encrypted and sent through SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS(Transport Layer Security) protocol, it can be exposed to the risk of sniffing by the digital certificate forgery at the proxy server, which is called the SSL MITM(Man-In-The-Middle) Proxy attack. In this paper, current credit card web-payment systems, which is weak at proxy information alternation attack, are analyzed. A resolution with certificate proxy server is also proposed to prevent the MITM attack.