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

21.3 BEAST

Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS (BEAST) [55] is an attack on the CBC-based encryption of the record layer in SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0. It is not a padding oracle but uses the predictability of the IV (as mentioned previously, the IV is the last cipher block of the previous TLS record in these versions) instead of attacking one byte of the first cipher block in CBC mode. Using the bytewise privilege technique described earlier, Mallory can move interesting bytes within this cipher block and step-by-step decrypt the complete first cipher block. Still, because the attack is restricted to the first cipher block after the IV, the impact of BEAST was rather limited because the contents of the first plaintext block are usually known. However, BEAST pointed to the fact that there is a serious problem with CBC mode within the TLS record layer.

The attacker model is basically the same as for POODLE, that is, Mallory is a man-in-the-middle who is able to eavesdrop on and manipulate messages...