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

14

Block Ciphers and Their Modes of Operation

The TLS Record protocol protects application data sent by Alice and Bob using shared secret keys established during their TLS handshake. We will start our study of the TLS Record protocol with its most fundamental building block: block ciphers. In this chapter, we discuss in detail what block ciphers are, what design principles govern the construction of secure block ciphers, what mathematical objects are used to model block ciphers, and what actual block cipher algorithms used in practice look like.

Block ciphers form an integral part of modern cryptography. However, RFC 8446, the IETF standard specifying TLS 1.3, does not explicitly treat block ciphers. Rather, it points to some related references, including NIST Special Publication 800-38D and IETF’s RFC 5116, RFC 6655, and RFC 8439. In contrast, we will cover block ciphers in quite some detail because cryptography of the TLS Record protocol cannot be understood in depth without...