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

7

Public-Key Cryptography

So far, we have learned that secret keys are absolutely necessary to establish a secure communication channel. We have seen how one can use them to achieve different security objectives, and that you should use a different cryptographic key for each objective.

In this chapter, we will explain how key transport and key agreement over an insecure channel can be made to work in a secure manner. The solution to this problem is called public-key cryptography, in which there are two kinds of keys: private keys, which are to be kept secret, as usual, and are only known to a single entity, and public keys, which are – you guessed it – public.

In addition to explaining the fundamentals of public-key cryptography, we will also cover RFC 8446 Section 7 Cryptographic Computations, in particular subsection 7.4 (EC)DHE Shared Secret Calculation.

Summing up, in this chapter we will introduce you to the following topics:

  • The mathematical structures in which public...