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

9.1 General considerations

Assume Alice has generated herself a key pair (PKAlice,SKAlice) within some asymmetric cryptosystem. If Alice uses her private key SKAlice to compute some output s = sigAlice(x) based on an input x, this is an operation that can, at least in principle, only be performed by Alice because she is the only one to know SKAlice. This is fundamentally different from the situation when symmetric cryptosystems are used because here, at least two parties know the key K and can perform the same operations.

The fact that only Alice can compute s for some given input x motivates us to interpret sigAlice as a digital signature. However, for this to work in practice, some important points need to be clarified:

  • There must be some way to verify that Alice has produced the signature and that the signed document has not been changed since it has been signed. As this should be possible for any party, the verification step should not involve any secret information, but must be...