Paper 2019/433

Secure Communication Channel Establishment: TLS 1.3 (over TCP Fast Open) versus QUIC

Shan Chen, Samuel Jero, Matthew Jagielski, Alexandra Boldyreva, and Cristina Nita-Rotaru

Abstract

Secure channel establishment protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) are some of the most important cryptographic protocols, enabling the encryption of Internet traffic. Reducing latency (the number of interactions between parties before encrypted data can be transmitted) in such protocols has become an important design goal to improve user experience. The most important protocols addressing this goal are TLS 1.3, the latest TLS version standardized in 2018 to replace the widely deployed TLS 1.2, and Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), a secure transport protocol from Google that is implemented in the Chrome browser. There have been a number of formal security analyses for TLS 1.3 and QUIC, but their security, when layered with their underlying transport protocols, cannot be easily compared. Our work is the first to thoroughly compare the security and availability properties of these protocols. Towards this goal, we develop novel security models that permit "layered'' security analysis. In addition to the standard goals of server authentication and data confidentiality and integrity, we consider the goals of IP spoofing prevention, key exchange packet integrity, secure channel header integrity, and reset authentication, which capture a range of practical threats not usually taken into account by existing security models that focus mainly on the cryptographic cores of the protocols. Equipped with our new models we provide a detailed comparison of three low-latency layered protocols: TLS 1.3 over TCP Fast Open (TFO), QUIC over UDP, and QUIC[TLS] (a new design for QUIC that uses TLS 1.3 key exchange) over UDP. In particular, we show that TFO's cookie mechanism does provably achieve the security goal of IP spoofing prevention. Additionally, we find several new availability attacks that manipulate the early key exchange packets without being detected by the communicating parties. By including packet-level attacks in our analysis, our results shed light on how the reliability, flow control, and congestion control of the above layered protocols compare, in adversarial settings. We hope that our models will help protocol designers in their future protocol analyses and that our results will help practitioners better understand the advantages and limitations of secure channel establishment protocols.

Note: A preliminary version of this paper appeared in ESORICS 2019. This final version for the Journal of Cryptology contains complete and improved security models, security analysis of the new IETF QUIC using TLS 1.3 for key exchange, and additional explanations.