In cryptography, the man in the middle attack (MITM) is an attack where the attacker is able to read, and possibly modify at will, messages between two parties without letting either party know that they have been attacked. The attacker must be able to observe and intercept messages going between the two victims.
With public keys an attack might look as follows:
Adam wishes to communicate with Betsy. Edith wishes to eavesdrop on the conversation, or possibly deliver a false message to Betsy. Adam will ask Betsy for her public key. Betsy will send her public key to Adam, but Edith will intercept it, and send Adam her own public key. Adam then encrypts his message with Edith's key (which he believes is Betsy's) and sends it back to Betsy. Edith again intercepts, decrypts the message and reads the contents. She then encrypts the message (altered if she so desires) with Betsy's key and sends it on to Betsy, who believes she has received it directly from Adam. A similar principle can apply to packets transmitted using any public key technology.
A "man in the middle" attack remains a primary weakness of public-key based systems. A standard mechanism for coping with such attacks is signed keys: if Betsy's key is signed by a trusted third party verifying her identity, Adam can be assured that a key he receives is not an attempt to intercept by Edith. Having keys signed by a certificate authority is the primary mechanism for secure world wide web traffic (see SSL). However, lax security in identity verification by certificate authorities is a vulnerability in this defense.
Of note: While this example focuses on MITM in a cryptographic sense, MITM should be seen as a general problem that results from allowing untrusted intermediate parties to act as a proxy for the clients on either side. By acting as a proxy and appearing as the trusted client to each side the intermediate attacker may perform various attacks against the confidentiality or integrity of the data passing through it.
