Spoof
A spoof is a humorous take on an established idea, cultural movement, television program, movie, play, or book. Spoofs almost always make satirical humour of the movie or play, poking fun at various aspects while retaining the general plot or idea. They are a form of parody.
The word "Spoof" finds its origin in a game involving trickery and nonsense. The game was invented by Arthur Roberts, an English comedian.
For example, see the films Blazing Saddles, a spoof of Westerns, and Spaceballs, a spoof of Star Wars, Star Trek, and science fiction in general.
The term is also used in computer security to refer to a situation in which one person or program is able to masquerade successfully as another. An example from cryptography is the man in the middle attack in which an attacker spoofs Alice into believing he's Bob, and spoofs Bob into believing he's Alice, thus gaining access to all messages in both directions without the trouble of any cryptanalytic effort.
Many insufficiently carefully designed protocols are subject to spoof attacks, including many of those used on the Internet. See internet protocol spoofing.
A related meaning is that of copyright holders placing distorted or unlistenable versions of works on file-sharing networks, to discourage downloading from these sources.
spoof is also a guessing game played with coins, popular in the UK and Australia. This game is unrelated to that invented by Arthur Roberts.
