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

22.6 Random number generation

In Chapter 3 A Secret to Share, we learned that the security of most protocols and mechanisms depends on the generation of random sequences of bits or numbers. These sequences must have a sufficient length and be random in a very specific sense: We do not want an attacker to be able to guess part of or the whole sequence.

Why? Recall the example from Chapter 3 A Secret to Share: The size of the key space of the AES-256 encryption algorithm is 2256. If the AES-256 key was selected using a truly random source, Eve would have to try on average 2255 candidate keys before she found the correct key.

However, if Alice generates the key by first choosing a 32-bit random number and then turning it into a 256-bit key using some complicated but deterministic expansion algorithm E, then Eve needs to try only 231 possible keys on average (obtained by running every possible 32-bit random number through E). To prevent this, Alice and Bob must generate the keys...