Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2011/219

On the Security of TLS-DHE in the Standard Model

Tibor Jager, Florian Kohlar, Sven Schäge, and Jörg Schwenk

Abstract: Abstract TLS is the most important cryptographic protocol in use today. However, up to now there is no com- plete cryptographic security proof in the standard model, nor in any other model. We give the first such proof for the core cryptographic protocol of TLS ciphersuites based on ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange (TLS-DHE), which include the cipher suite TLS DHE DSS WITH 3DES EDE CBC SHA mandatory in TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. It is impossible to prove security of the TLS handshake in any classical key-indistinguishability- based security model (like e.g. the Bellare-Rogaway or the Canetti-Krawczyk model), due to subtle issues with the encryption of the final Finished messages of the TLS handshake. Therefore we start with proving the security of a truncated version of the TLS handshake, which has also been considered in previous work on TLS. Then we define the notion of authenticated and confidential channel establishment (ACCE) as a new security model which captures precisely the security properties expected from TLS in practice, and show that the combination of the TLS handshake with the TLS Record Layer can be proven secure in this model.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Authenticated key agreement, SSL, TLS, provable security, ephemeral Diffie-Hellman

Date: received 6 May 2011, last revised 21 May 2012

Contact author: tibor jager at rub de

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Fixed notational issues.

Version: 20120521:152603 (All versions of this report)

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion