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

10.2 X.509 certificates

Because digital certificates are exchanged and automatically interpreted by various entities and systems, there must be a standard prescribing the format and data fields of a digital certificate. The oldest and most important digital certificate standard is called X.509, with v3 being its newest version.

In X.509, digital certificates are always issued by a CA. X.509 is an offspring of X.500, an early attempt by the OSI at a global directory structure, in which every entity has a globally unique Distinguished Name (DN). A distinguished name, in turn, is a collection of Relative Distinguished Names (RDNs). This naming scheme was also adopted for X.509 certificates. For example, according to his X.509 certificate, one of the authors of this book has the distinguished name C = DE, O = Hochschule der Medien, CN = Roland Schmitz, where C stands for Country, DE stands for Germany, O stands for Organization, and CN stands for Common Name. The CN should be unique within...