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

5

Entity Authentication

In Chapter 2, Secure Channel and the CIA Triad, we saw that Alice and Bob need the CIA triad – the combination of the cryptographic goals confidentiality, integrity, and authentication – to establish a secure communication channel in the presence of both passive and active attackers. We defined what authentication is, gave several examples illustrating what happens when authentication goes wrong, and briefly discussed the two types of authentication used in cryptography, namely message authentication and entity authentication.

In this chapter, we are going to cover authentication – in particular entity authentication – in much more detail. Particularly, we will discuss the following:

  • Why entity authentication is absolutely necessary to establish a secure channel

  • The mathematical properties of cryptographically secure authentication

  • Why password-based authentication is rather weak

  • Several types of cryptographic protocols for strong...