Paper 2017/784

Secure Channels and Termination: The Last Word on TLS

Colin Boyd and Britta Hale

Abstract

Secure channels are one of the most pivotal building blocks of cryptography today. Internet connections, secure messaging, protected IoT data, etc., all rely upon the security of the underlying channel. In this work we define channel protocols, as well as security for channels constructed from stateful length-hiding authenticated encryption (stLHAE) schemes. Furthermore, we initiate the concept of secure termination where, upon receipt of a signifying message, a receiver is guaranteed to have received every message that has been sent, and will ever be sent, on the channel. We apply our results to real-world protocols, linking the channel environment to previous analyses of TLS 1.2, and demonstrating that TLS 1.2 achieves secure termination via fatal alerts and close_notify messages, per the specification of the Alert Protocol.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Latincrypt, 2017
Keywords
Secure channelssecure terminationcontrollable channel protocolTransport Layer Security (TLS)
Contact author(s)
britta hale @ ntnu no
History
2017-11-06: revised
2017-08-19: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/784
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/784,
      author = {Colin Boyd and Britta Hale},
      title = {Secure Channels and Termination: The Last Word on TLS},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/784},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/784}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/784}
}
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