Active Attack Vs. Passive Attack

1. In an active attack, the attacker intercepts the connection and modifies the information in order to masquerade, replay message modification, or perform a denial of service attack. This attack can be detected by potential security mechanism.

2. In a passive attack, the attacker intercepts the transmitted information with the intention of reading and analyzing the information, however, in this scenario the attacker does not modify the information. A passive attack is difficult to detect. Many time passive attack is initiated to launch an active attack. To protect against a passive attack encryption is usually put in place. Both passive and active attacks can also considered as the Man-in-the-Middle attack.