Detecting ARP spoofing: An active technique

Abstract

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) due to its statelessness and lack of an authentication mechanism for verifying the identity of the sender has a long history of being prone to spoofing attacks. ARP spoofing is sometimes the starting point for more sophisticated LAN attacks like denial of service, man in the middle and session hijacking. The current methods of detection use a passive approach, monitoring the ARP traffic and looking for inconsistencies in the Ethernet to IP address mapping. The main drawback of the passive approach is the time lag between learning and detecting spoofing. This sometimes leads to the attack being discovered long after it has been orchestrated. In this paper, we present an active technique to detect ARP spoofing. We inject ARP request and TCP SYN packets into the network to probe for inconsistencies. This technique is faster, intelligent, scalable and more reliable in detecting attacks than the passive methods. It can also additionally detect the real mapping of MAC to IP addresses to a fair degree of accuracy in the event of an actual attack. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidolborg 2005.