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

8.5 Elliptic curves in TLS 1.3

Elliptic curves provide one option within the TLS handshake protocol for server Alice and client Bob to agree on a shared secret. First of all, Alice and Bob have to negotiate whether they want to use elliptic curves at all, and which curve they are going to use.

The supported˙groups extension that client Bob sends to server Alice in his ClientHello message to negotiate the cryptographic parameters contains a list of groups that Bob wants to use to establish the secret key with Alice via ECDH. The list is ordered according to Bob’s preference in descending order.

Technically, the supported˙groups extension has a field called extension˙data. This field contains a value of the type NamedGroupList, defined as shown in Listing 8.1.

Listing 8.1: NamedGroupList in supported_groups extension

struct {
   NamedGroup named_group_list<2..2^16-1>;
} NamedGroupList;

Each entry in NamedGroupList is a named group...