Analysis of a Man-in-the-Middle Experiment with Wireshark

With the rapid growth of the Internet user population and the magnitude of the applications depending on the Internet these days, network security measures are becoming extremely important. For the Internet users, one of the best defenses against network attacks is to understand the patterns of the attacks and raise the awareness of abnormality as much as possible. In this paper, an experiment was employed to demonstrate a form of active attacks, called Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, in which the entire communication between the victims is controlled by the attacker. A detailed description of setting up the system for MITM is included. The victim initiated a few activities that cause the attacks, which were captured by Wireshark at the attacker site and analyzed. The result clearly reveals the pattern of the MITM attack. Some remarks on the preventive measures were made based on the result.