RE: Cain a& Abel Question

["Cushing, David" <David.Cushing () hitachisoftware com>]

Pete,

What you are seeing is the result of a "man in the middle" style attack rather than a decoding of your SSL connection 
to the bank.

C&A is intercepting and forwarding your traffic due to the ARP poisoning.  Your browser negotiates an SSL connection 
with C&A.  C&A negotiates another SSL connection to the bank.  Then C&A is able to see all traffic in plaintext as it 
passes it along.

Browser <--ssl--> C&A (plaintext) <--ssl--> Bank

The program is not able to generate a proper certificate to hand your browser, though.  It is self signed and will not 
be trusted by your browser.  An alert should have popped up when you opened the page.  Did it?

Cain info: http://www.oxid.it/cain_faq.html
MiM info: http://www.sans.org/rr/threats/man_in_the_middle.php 
--
David

> -----Original Message-----
> I was reading thru the list and decided to give Cain & Abel a try...
> it is a really powerful tool, I do have a question, I was running it
> using the ARP poisoning from one of my test machines to my internet
> gateway.. (Cisco 3600 series) I logged into my On-line 
> banking account,
> which is an SSL connection, and Cain & Abel picked up my username and
> passsword as "Clear text"... I guess I am confused about this...
> when I goto the site, it is an SSL site,it appears that the entire
> session is SSL, and Cain & Abel is not doing any sort of 
> "Cracking" and
> if the software "Cain & Abel" is doing
> some sort of sniffing, wouldn't it be encrypted via SSL?
 

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