What is a recommended action to prevent replay attacks?

Using encryption and time-stamping is a recommended action to prevent replay attacks because it provides both security and context for each transaction or communication. In a replay attack, an attacker captures and re-sends a valid data transmission, tricking the receiving system into accepting it again as legitimate. This can happen because the data itself lacks any freshness indicator.

By employing encryption, the data being transmitted becomes unreadable to anyone intercepting it, thus preventing them from simply re-sending the same data later. Added to this, time-stamping ensures that each packet has a time marker indicating when it was sent. If a transmission is intercepted and replayed after its time-stamped validity period has expired, the receiving system can recognize this and reject it. Together, these measures significantly enhance security against replay attacks by ensuring that both the content of the communication and its context in time are protected.