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In the security, there is a famous attack called man-in-the-middle.

I want to ask: in the common case, does this attack refering to the attacker to be an imposter of the client or the imposter of the server?

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There is no common case. All man in the middle attacks are different. Often the attacker is pretending to be both though. –  Tom Medley Feb 19 '11 at 14:21
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It's most commonly a server imposter, and most commonly through browsers. -

Client -> attacker -> Server

Client will be compromised by whatever method and connect to the man-in-the-middle rather than the real server.

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Simply Imposter of the Client for Server and Imposter of the Server for Client

Imposter is simply standing in middle and handling and/or modifying the request for both the Client and Server

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The Man-in-the-middle attack refers to an attack where someone "steps into the middle" of a conversation between a client and a server.

I find the following illustration very telling:

Illustration of the scenario

That is, Mallory (the "(wo)man in the middle") goes between the client (Alice) and server (Bob).

  • When Mallory is talking to Alice, she pretends to be Bob.
  • When Mallory is talking to Bob, she pretends to be Alice.

Because Alice thinks that Mallory is Bob, and Bob thinks that Mallory is Alice, Mallory gets to observe and manipulate the data that Alice and Bob want to pass between each other in whichever way she pleases.

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Most of the time its the client even the server can happen.MAN in the middle is always does is ..capture the user data packets and modify/readthem and resend to the receiver of visa versa

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