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

3.5 Crypto-agility and information half-life

Because fundamental advances in cryptanalysis cannot be reliably predicted, especially for prolonged periods of time, it is desirable to design security systems in such a way that the transition to longer keys (or stronger cryptographic mechanisms) is possible and, ideally, easy to do. This concept is called crypto-agility. It is an important feature of a secure system: when, for example, NIST looked for a new standard block cipher algorithm (the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES; see Chapter 14, Block Ciphers and Their Modes of Operation) in a competition held between 1997 and 2000, all candidate algorithms had to support varying key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits.

Conceptually, crypto-agility is to information security what software updates are to software engineering. A well-designed security system takes into account that at some future point in time, it will face some previously unknown attacks. Because the specific attacks...