Book Image

TLS Cryptography In-Depth

By : Dr. Paul Duplys, Dr. Roland Schmitz
Book Image

TLS Cryptography In-Depth

By: Dr. Paul Duplys, Dr. Roland Schmitz

Overview of this book

TLS is the most widely used cryptographic protocol today, enabling e-commerce, online banking, and secure online communication. Written by Dr. Paul Duplys, Security, Privacy & Safety Research Lead at Bosch, and Dr. Roland Schmitz, Internet Security Professor at Stuttgart Media University, this book will help you gain a deep understanding of how and why TLS works, how past attacks on TLS were possible, and how vulnerabilities that enabled them were addressed in the latest TLS version 1.3. By exploring the inner workings of TLS, you’ll be able to configure it and use it more securely. Starting with the basic concepts, you’ll be led step by step through the world of modern cryptography, guided by the TLS protocol. As you advance, you’ll be learning about the necessary mathematical concepts from scratch. Topics such as public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves will be explained with a view on real-world applications in TLS. With easy-to-understand concepts, you’ll find out how secret keys are generated and exchanged in TLS, and how they are used to creating a secure channel between a client and a server. By the end of this book, you’ll have the knowledge to configure TLS servers securely. Moreover, you’ll have gained a deep knowledge of the cryptographic primitives that make up TLS.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
1
Part I Getting Started
8
Part II Shaking Hands
16
Part III Off the Record
22
Part IV Bleeding Hearts and Biting Poodles
27
Bibliography
28
Index

8.3 Elliptic curves over finite fields

Now let’s see what elliptic curves over finite fields look like. As we established in the last chapter, there are only two kinds of finite fields: 𝔽p = {0,1,2,,p − 1}, where p is a prime number, and 𝔽p[X]∕M, where p is a prime number and M is an irreducible polynomial of degree n with coeffcients ai ∈𝔽p. The essential difference between the two is that 𝔽p has p elements, whereas 𝔽p[X]∕M has pn elements. For this reason, 𝔽p[X]∕M is often called 𝔽pn without explicitly stating the polynomial M.

8.3.1 Elliptic curves over 𝔽p

We focus on the case p > 3, so that char(𝔽p) > 3. Then it is always possible to generate the reduced Weierstrass form of the curve, and we can use the following definition.

Elliptic curve over 𝔽p

Let p > 3 be a prime number. An elliptic curve over 𝔽p is the set of points (x,y) satisfying...