D-ARP: An Efficient Scheme to Detect and Prevent ARP Spoofing

Abstract

Nowadays, cyber-attack is a severe criminal violation, and it is one of the most active fields of research. Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM) is a type of cyber-attack in which an unauthorized third party secretly accesses the communication between two hosts in the same network to read=modify the transferred data between them. ARP spoofing-based MITM attack exploits ARP protocol weakness where the attacker associates its MAC address with the IP address of an intended legitimate host. Although there are many defense approaches for ARP spoofing based-MITM attacks, these methods are uncompleted or have a performance overhead since they modify the original ARP protocol. Also, some of these approaches depend on the centralized server which leads to a single point of failure. This paper presents a detection scheme for ARP spoofing-based MITM attack called D-ARP which is compatible with the original ARP protocol. The main idea of D-ARP is to send an ARP packet signed with a key in parallel with the original ARP packets to make a correlation between requests and replies. Each host records the signed ARP packets whether it is a request or a reply in a log file. Based on this correlation, D-ARP matches the injected key to detect ARP spoofing if there is a duplicate or conflict in the MAC address. For more reliability, D-ARP uses the DHCP server and the Nmap feature to detect the MAC addresses of MITM attackers. Moreover, this scheme also offers a module for Admin to create a trusted list of hosts. The experimental results show that D-ARP is very effective to detect and prevent ARP spoofing with zero false positives and zero false negative probabilities without any modifications in the original ARP protocol.