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What's a meet-in-the-middle cryptanalytic attack?
It's an attack that exploits mathematical vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms.
It's an attack when an attacker calculates the probability of specific key by using a block algorithm.
It's an attack that attempts encryption from one end and decryption from the other.
It's an attack that exploits statistical weaknesses in a targeted algorithm.
It's an attack that attempts encryption from one end and decryption from the other.
What is difference between meet in the middle attack and man in the middle attack? These are completely different things:
Man-in-the-middle is an active attack to a cryptographic protocol, where the attacker is, effectively, in between the communications of two users, and is capable of intercepting, relying, and (possibly) altering messages. In this case, the meaning of "in the middle" is direct: the attacker is in the middle of two communicating users.
Meet-in-the-middle is a type of cryptanalytic attack that uses some sort of time-space trade-off to drastically reduce the effort to perform a brute-force attack (e.g., transforming an attack that requires 2exp128 time into one that takes 2exp64 time and 2exp64 space). In this case, the name of the attack comes from the expression "let's meet in the middle", which means "to make a compromise". It may also refer to a type of attack over certain block ciphers, where the attacker decompose the problem in two halves and proceeds on each part separately. The biggest difference between these attacks is that the first one is interactive (i.e., the attacker must participate in the communication), while the second one isn't.
The confusion may come from the fact that certain protocols could receive both type of attacks. For example, in your question you are talking about the Diffie-Hellman key exchange:
A Man-in-the-middle attack to this protocol is exactly the one you describe
A Meet-in-the-middle attack focus on extracting a private key by finding the discrete logarithm using some time-space trade-off (e.g., baby-step giant-step algorithm)
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