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

5.1 The identity concept

Let’s recall from Chapter 2, Secure Channel and the CIA Triad that entity authentication is the ability to assure one communicating party – using fresh supporting evidence – of the identity of a second communicating party and to ensure that the second party was actually active when the supporting evidence was generated [117].

But what do we actually mean by the term identity? According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, identity is the distinguishing character or personality of an individual as well as the condition of being the same with something described or asserted. In cryptography, identity typically refers to a unique property of a communicating party. This actually can mean a lot of things; it might be the name that can be found in your passport, or the pseudonym you have chosen for yourself when posting on www.dogforums.com. As communicating parties very often involve computers, it might also be the name of a server...