Spoof attack - Definition and Overview

This article or section should be merged with Spoofing attacks

A spoof attack, in computer security terms, refers to a situation in which one person or program is able to masquerade successfully as another. An example from cryptography is the man in the middle attack in which an attacker spoofs Alice into believing he's Bob, and spoofs Bob into believing he's Alice, thus gaining access to all messages in both directions without the trouble of any cryptanalytic effort.

Many insufficiently carefully designed protocols are subject to spoof attacks, including many of those used on the Internet. See internet protocol spoofing.

A related meaning is that of copyright holders placing distorted or unlistenable versions of works on file-sharing networks, to discourage downloading from these sources.