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

11.8 Summary

In this chapter, we learned how hash functions and message authentication code work, what mathematical properties they have, and how to construct them. Moreover, we covered several popular mechanisms, such as HMAC and the SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 algorithms from the SHA-2 hash algorithm family. Last but not least, we looked into the application of hash functions and message authentication code in the TLS 1.3 handshake protocol.

This chapter introduced the last building block required to understand how the TLS handshake protocol works in detail. Congratulations: you now know what Alice and Bob actually do to establish a TLS session!

In the next chapter, we will wrap up TLS 1.3 handshake. To do this, we will zoom out of the cryptographic details and give a higher-level description of TLS handshake using state machines for the TLS server and TLS client, which are specified in RFC 8446. Moreover, we will show how you can use s˙client, a TLS client program from the...