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

6.4 TLS overview

The main task of the TLS protocol is to create a secure communication channel between two parties: server Alice and client Bob. The only thing that RFC 8446 assumes is a reliable, in-order data stream on the underlying transport layer. The two most widely used transport layer protocols are the Transport Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

Thus, TCP lends itself to being a transport layer for TLS. In contrast, TLS doesn’t work with protocols such as UDP that provide no guarantees regarding message delivery or the sequence of the messages. There is, however, a closely related alternative to TLS called Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), which works on top of UDP and offers similar security guarantees to TLS [149].

6.4.1 TLS terminology

RFC 8446 uses the following terms to specify TLS. A client is an endpoint that initiates a TLS connection. A server is an endpoint that receives the request from the client to establish a TLS connection...