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

16.2 GCM security

GCM’s biggest security risk is its fragility in case of nonce repetition. NIST’s GCM standard [57] requires the following:

The probability that the authenticated encryption function ever will be invoked with the same IV and the same key on two (or more) distinct sets of input data shall be no greater than 2−32.

Moreover, care must be taken that the nonces do not repeat: if the same nonce N is used twice in an AES-GCM computation, an attacker would be able to compute the authentication key H. With the help of H, tags for any ciphertext, associated data, or both can be fabricated.

This is easy to see with a little bit of math. The authentication tag is computed as:


T = GHASH (H, A,C )⊕ E (N ∥0) K

Now, if we have two tags T1 and T2 computed with the same nonce N, we can XOR T1 and T2 to obtain the following expression:


GHASH (H, A1,C1 )⊕ EK (N ∥0)⊕ GHASH (H,A2, C2)⊕ EK (N ∥0)

Because x x = 0, the term EK(N∥0) (the AES encryption of N∥0 under the secret key K) will vanish. As a result, the attacker obtains...