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

4.5 Pseudorandomness

Computational security is built on the concept of pseudorandomness, the idea that bit strings (that is, ciphertexts) can look completely random even though they are not.

Pseudorandomness enables us to build (computationally) secure symmetric encryption schemes where a relatively short key, let’s say 128 bits long, is used to securely encrypt multiple terabytes of plaintext messages.

In a nutshell – the precise mathematical details are, of course, much more complex – this works because a polynomial-time attacker cannot distinguish between a pseudorandom string and a truly random string. This means that, for the attacker, the ciphertext looks like it has been produced by a one-time pad, using the pseudorandom string as a key.

Pseudorandom strings can be created using a pseudorandom generator. This is a deterministic algorithm that takes a short, truly random string as input and expands it into a long pseudorandom string [97]. Figure 4...