Which spoofing technique uses ARP messages to perform DoS attacks, also known as ARP poisoning?

• A. Spoofing (ARP)
• B. Spoofing (DNS)
• C. Spoofing (IP)
• D. Spyware

Answer: (A)

ARP spoofing relies on the lack of authentication in the Address Resolution Protocol to map IP addresses to MAC addresses on a local network. By sending forged ARP replies, an attacker can poison the ARP caches of other devices, making them associate a victim or gateway IP with the attacker’s MAC. This misleads legitimate traffic, causing it to be misrouted, dropped, or flooded, which leads to a denial of service. ARP is used only within local networks, and ARP responses can update caches quickly, which is what makes this attack effective on a LAN.

DNS spoofing and IP spoofing involve different mechanisms: DNS spoofing manipulates domain-name translations to redirect users to malicious hosts, not ARP tables; IP spoofing forges the source IP in packets rather than altering local MAC-to-IP mappings; spyware is unrelated to these network-layer spoofing techniques. In short, ARP spoofing is the spoofing technique that uses ARP messages to perform DoS.