7 Network vulnerabilities
In this chapter
- How monster-in-the-middle attacks can be used to snoop on unencrypted traffic
- How your users can be misdirected by DNS poisoning attacks and doppelganger domains
- How your certificates and encryption keys could be compromised—and what to do if they are
In chapter 6, we looked at vulnerabilities that occur in the browser. In chapter 8, we will start to look at how web servers exhibit vulnerabilities. Between the two, however, are a lot of internet and a large class of vulnerabilities that occur as traffic passes back and forth.
Securing traffic passing over the internet is theoretically a solved problem: a modern browser supports strong encryption, and obtaining a certificate for your web application is relatively straightforward. The hacking community is nothing if not ingenious, however; it continues to find ways to throw a wrench into the works.
The network vulnerabilities we will look at in this chapter can be divided into three categories: intercepting and snooping on traffic, misleading the user about where traffic is going, and stealing or spoofing credentials (including keys) to steal traffic at its destination. Let’s start with the first class of network vulnerability.