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

12.4 Updating TLS secrets

At any time after a successful handshake, Alice and Bob can update their application traffic keys using the KeyUpdate message. They accomplish this by first deriving new secrets server˙application˙traffic˙secret˙N+1 and client˙application˙traffic˙secret˙N+1 using the HKDF-Expand-Label function HEL as shown in Figure 12.13. After that, new application traffic keys are computed using a mechanism we will discuss in the next section.

Figure 12.13: Mechanism for updating TLS application traffic secrets

Figure 12.13: Mechanism for updating TLS application traffic secrets

The TLS 1.3 specification recommends Alice and Bob to delete the n-th server/client application traffic secret and its associated key once the n + 1-th secret has been derived and corresponding traffic keys have been computed.

This is another example of a best practice in applied cryptography and security engineering: as soon as cryptographic material is no longer needed, it should be deleted so it cannot...