Spoofing attack in the context of "Adversary (cryptography)"

In cryptography, an adversary (rarely opponent, enemy) is an entity whose aim is to prevent the users of the cryptosystem from achieving their goal (primarily privacy, integrity, and availability of data), often with malicious intent. An adversary's efforts might take the form of attempting to discover secret data, corrupting some of the data in the system, spoofing the identity of a message sender or receiver, or forcing system downtime.

Actual adversaries, as opposed to idealized ones, are referred to as attackers. The former term predominates in the cryptographic and the latter in the computer security literature. Eavesdropper Eve, malicious attacker Mallory, opponent Oscar, and intruder Trudy are all adversarial characters widely used in both types of texts.