A self-confirming engine for preventing man-in-the-middle attack

SUMMARY In this paper, we focus on how to correct address mapping violation, in which an attacker rewrites the address mapping table of a victim to perform a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. We propose a technique for preventing MITM attacks in which a malicious user intercepts and possibly alters the data transmitted between two hosts. MITM attack is hard for legitimate users to notice during their normal communication, because each user believes they are communicating directly. Address mapping violation can occur because of vulnerability of address resolution protocols, Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) in IPv4 and Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol in IPv6. Accordingly, a good method to prevent MITM attack by address mapping violation is essential for both current and future communications, i.e. wireless networks with roaming users and an interconnected world. Hence, our proposal mainly aims to have high usability in future applications such as embedded devices.