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

6.2 Early web browsers

At this point in time, two types of browsers were available to the early users of the WWW. The original browser developed by Berners-Lee had more sophisticated features but could only run on NeXT machines. The line-mode browser, on the other hand, could run on any platform but had fewer features and limited usability. After Berners-Lee’s call to action for developers to join, individuals across the world started writing browsers, in particular for the X Window System[44].

In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of its web browser called Mosaic, which was developed by Marc Andreessen and his colleagues [40]. Mosaic ran on the X Window System and provided web users a user-friendly graphical interface with the same sort of point-and-click graphical manipulations they were used to on their personal computers (see Figure 6.2). Shortly afterward, NCSA released Mosaic...