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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

Man-in-the-middle attack

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, man-in-the-middle attack means: An attack in which someone secretly places themselves between two communicating parties so that they can read or change the traffic passing between them.

In Turkish: ortadaki adam saldırısı, araya girme saldırısı

How it is used

Often shortened to MITM. Typical settings are public Wi-Fi and unencrypted connections; TLS with proper certificate checks is the main protection. Many organisations now prefer the neutral terms 'on-path attack' or 'adversary-in-the-middle' (AitM).

Example sentences

  1. Without certificate validation, the mobile app was open to a man-in-the-middle attack.

  2. HSTS helps protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks on the login page.

Common collocations

  • MITM attack
  • on-path attack
  • adversary-in-the-middle
  • intercept traffic
  • TLSTransport Layer Security: the standard protocol that encrypts data travelling between two systems, such as a browser and a website, and checks the server's identity.
  • digital certificateAn electronic document that links a public key to an identity, such as a website or a person, and is signed by a trusted certificate authority.
  • encryptionTurning data into an unreadable form that can only be turned back with the right key, so that people without the key cannot read it.
  • spoofingFaking an identity or source, such as an email sender, a phone number, a website or an IP address, so that a message or connection seems to come from someone trusted.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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