Once a client and server have established a pre-master-secret, no more public-key operations are needed as further master secrets can be obtained by hashing it with new nonces.
5.7.5.1 TLS uses
The full protocol is more complex than this, and has gone through a number of versions. It has supported a number of different ciphersuites, initially so that export versions of software could be limited to 40 bit keys – a condition of export licensing that was imposed for many years by the US government. This led to downgrade attacks where a middleperson could force the use of weak keys. Other ciphersuites support signed Diffie-Hellman key exchanges for transient keys, to provide forward and backward secrecy. TLS also has options for bidirectional authentication so that if the client also has a certificate, this can be checked by the server. In addition, the working keys
As well as being used to encrypt web traffic, TLS has also been available as an authentication option in Windows from Windows 2000 onwards; you can use it instead of Kerberos for authentication on corporate networks. I will describe its use in more detail in the chapter on network attack and defence.
5.7.5.2 TLS security
Although early versions of SSL had a number of bugs [1977], SSL 3.0 and later appear to be sound; the version after SSL 3.0 was renamed TLS 1.0. It was formally verified by Larry Paulson in 1998, so we know that the idealised version of the protocol doesn't have any bugs [1504].
However, in the more than twenty years since then, there have been over a dozen serious attacks. Even in 1998, Daniel Bleichenbacher came up with the first of a number of attacks based on measuring the time it takes a server to decrypt, or the error messages it returns in response to carefully-crafted protocol responses [265]. TLS 1.1 appeared in 2006 with protection against exploits of CBC encryption and of padding errors; TLS 1.2 followed two years later, upgrading the hash function to SHA256 and supporting authenticated encryption; and meanwhile there were a number of patches dealing with various attacks that had emerged. Many of these patches were rather inelegant because of the difficulty of changing a widely-used protocol; it's difficult to change both the server and client ends at once, as any client still has to interact with millions of servers, many running outdated software, and most websites want to be able to deal with browsers of all ages and on all sorts of devices. This has been dealt with by the big service firms changing their browsers to reject obsolete ciphersuites, and to add features like strict transport security (STS) whereby a website can instruct browsers to only interact with it using https in future (to prevent downgrade attacks). The browser firms have also mandated a number of other supporting measures, from shorter certificate lifetimes to certificate transparency, which we'll discuss in the chapter on network attack and defence.
5.7.5.3 TLS 1.3
The most recent major upgrade to the core protocol, TLS 1.3, was approved by the IETF in January 2019 after two years of discussion. It has dropped backwards compatibility in order to end support for many old ciphers, and made it mandatory to establish end-to-end forward secrecy by means of a Diffie-Hellman key exchange at the start of each session. This has caused controversy with the banking industry, which routinely intercepts encrypted sessions in order to do monitoring for compliance purposes. This will no longer be possible, so banks will have to bear the legal discomfort of using obsolete encryption or the financial cost of redeveloping systems to monitor compliance at endpoints instead11.
5.7.6 Other public-key protocols
Dozens of other public-key protocols have found wide use, including the following, most of which we'll discuss in detail later. Here I'll briefly mention code signing, PGP and QUIC.
5.7.6.1 Code signing
Code signing was introduced in the 1990s when people started downloading software rather than getting it on diskettes. It is now used very widely to assure the provenance of software. You might think that having a public signature-verification key in your software so that version
5.7.6.2 PGP/GPG
During the ‘Crypto Wars’ in the 1990s, cyber-activists fought governments for the right to encrypt email, while governments pushed for laws restricting encryption; I'll discuss the history and politics in section 26.2.7. The crypto activist Phil Zimmermann wrote an open-source encryption product Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and circumvented U.S. export controls by publishing the source code in a paper book, which could be posted, scanned and compiled. Along with later compatible products such as GPG, it has become fairly widely used among geeks. For example, sysadmins,
