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

22.5 Insecure encryption activation

Systems that use older plaintext protocols require backward compatibility. In this case, Alice and Bob start the communication without encryption and must explicitly upgrade it to use TLS. As an example, if they use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), published by American computer scientists Jon Postel and Suzanne Sluizer in 1981 (RFC 788), they have to use the STARTTLS command to start a TLS session.

The need to explicitly activate secure communication creates additional attack vectors if application code running on Alice’s or Bob’s machine contains implementation flaws – not programming bugs, but logical mistakes in the implementation affecting its security [150].

One such flaw is missing STARTTLS enforcement. When a legacy protocol can be used without encryption, Bob’s software is responsible for enforcing the desired security level. A common flaw in such software is to request encryption but proceed without it...