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

10.6 Summary

In this chapter, we have discussed digital certificates as a means to provide authenticity for public keys, and the bodies that issue certificates, Certification Authorities (CAs). In particular, we looked at the minimum set of data that needs to be presented within a certificate, and the optional parts of a certificate.

Regarding CAs, we discussed their tasks and the processes for obtaining and validating certificates. We have also seen how CAs fit into the larger structure needed to manage public keys, the Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI).

After these more general considerations, we looked in detail at how digital certificates are handled within the TLS 1.3 handshake protocol.

The next chapter will be more technical again, as it discusses hash functions and message authentication codes. Apart from digital signatures (which also use hash functions), they are the main cryptographic mechanisms for providing authenticity to handshake messages.