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

To get the most out of this book

Simply be curious! Since we develop most concepts from scratch, you don’t need any additional literature, information sources, or tools to follow the book. If you decide to delve deeper into cryptography than what is covered in the book, you will find numerous useful references in the bibliography.

For readers interested in hands-on experiments with TLS, we describe several simple experiments that you can replicate (and extend) on any computer with the OpenSSL toolkit installed on it. The code listings in the corresponding chapters contain complete instructions, so there is nothing extra to download.

If you are generally interested in modern cryptography, you may skip sections describing how the individual cryptographic primitives and mechanisms are used in TLS 1.3. However, we recommend you have at least a cursory look at Part IV, Bleeding Hearts and Biting Poodles, to get an idea of why getting cryptography right is hard.

If you are interested specifically in TLS 1.3, we recommend reading the book side by side with RFC 8446. Moreover, as you are likely familiar with basic cryptography, you may skip Part I, Getting Started.