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

22.4 Heartbleed

In 2014, Google’s security team member Neel Mehta privately reported an implementation bug to OpenSSL’s developer team. The same bug was independently discovered by security engineers working for Codenomicon, a Finnish security company specialized in network security that was eventually acquired by Synopsys. Following its disclosure, Heartbleed was assigned the CVE number CVE-2014-0160.

At the time of Heartbleed’s disclosure, more than half a million web servers – about 17% of all web servers using TLS at that time – were believed to be vulnerable to the attack. More importantly, Heartbleed allowed attackers to steal the servers’ private keys.

The private key SKAlice of a TLS server is its long-term secret corresponding to the public key in the server’s certificate. If Eve manages to compromises Alice’s private key, this has grave consequences: Eve can impersonate Alice and decrypt any future communication between...