John works as a professional Ethical Hacker. He has been assigned the project of testing the a man-in-the-middle attack since the key exchange process of the cryptographic algorithm it is using does…

Question

Options

• ABlowfish
• BTwofish
• CRSA
• DDiffie-Hellman

• A
  3% (1)
• B
  12% (4)
• C
  3% (1)
• D
  82% (27)

Explanation

Diffie-Hellman (D) is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks precisely because it is a key exchange protocol that authenticates no one - it allows two parties to establish a shared secret over an insecure channel, but an attacker can intercept and impersonate both sides without detection during that exchange.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• Blowfish (A) and Twofish (B) are symmetric-key block ciphers used for encrypting data, not for key exchange - they don't have a "key exchange process" to exploit.
• RSA (C) is an asymmetric algorithm that does support authentication (via digital signatures and certificates), making it resistant to unauthenticated MITM scenarios; it is also used for encryption, not pure key exchange.

Memory tip: Think "DH = Do Handshake (but don't verify who you're shaking hands with)." Diffie-Hellman gives you a secret tunnel but never checks who's standing at the other end - that's the MITM gap. HTTPS fixes this by wrapping DH inside TLS with certificate-based authentication.

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