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Commonly confused · Security Fundamentals & Crypto

Man-in-the-Middle vs Replay Attack: What's the Difference?

In an on-path (man-in-the-middle) attack the attacker sits between two parties in real time, relaying and possibly altering traffic. In a replay attack the attacker captures valid data, such as an authentication token, and resends it later to gain access.

On-Path (Man-in-the-Middle) Attack

vs

Replay Attack

Full definition

	On-Path (Man-in-the-Middle) Attack	Replay Attack
Timing	Real time, live interception	Later, after capture
Modification	Can read and alter traffic	Resends data unchanged
Position	Must stay in the communication path	Only needs to capture once
Example	Rogue Wi-Fi access point intercepting logins	Re-sending a captured session token or keyless car signal
Defenses	TLS with certificate validation, HSTS, mutual auth	Nonces, timestamps, session expiry, sequence numbers

Remember it

MITM listens in now; replay plays it back later.

Exam tip

Security+ uses the term on-path attack. When a question mentions timestamps or nonces as the fix, the attack being prevented is replay.

Tested on

CompTIA Security+EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH)ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)CompTIA Network+ISC2 CISSP

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