The TLS handshake¶

When used to interact with a regular web server, the TLS handshake has three important objectives :

1. Securely negotiate the cryptographic algorithms that will be used by the client and the server on the TLS session
2. Verify that the client interacts with a valid server
3. Securely agree on the keys that will be used to encrypt and authenticate the messages exchanged over the TLS session

Let us first discuss the negotiation of the cryptographic algorithms and parameters. Like all security protocols, TLS includes some agility in its design since new cryptographic algorithms appear over the years and some older algorithms become deprecated once cryptanalysts find flaws in some of them. The TLS handshakes starts with the ClientHello message that is sent by the client. This message carries the following information :

• Protocol version number : this is the version of the TLS protocol supported by the client. The server should use the same version of the TLS protocol as the client, but may opt for an older version. The current TLS standard is version 1.2 but the IETF is currently preparing version 1.3 and some implementations already support this non-standard version.
• Random number : security protocols rely on random numbers. The client sends a 32 bytes long random number where usually four of these bytes correspond to the client’s clock. This random number will be used, together with the server’s random number, as a seed to generate the security keys.
• Cipher suites : this ordered list contains the set of cryptographic algorithms that are supported by the client, with the most preferred one listed first. In contrast with ssh that allows to negotiate independant algorithms for encryption, key exchange and authentication, TLS relies on suites that combine these algorithms together. Many cryptographic suites have been defined for TLS. Various recommendations have been published on the security of some of these suites RFC 7525.
• Compression algorithm : the client may propose the utilisation of a specific compression algorithm (e.g. zlib). In theory, compressing the data before encrypting it is an intelligent way to reduce the amount of data exchanged. Unfortunately, its implementation in TLS lead to attacks. For this reason, compression is usually disabled in TLS RFC 7525.
• Extensions : TLS supports various extensions in the ClientHello message. These extensions RFC 6066 are important to allow the protocol to evolve, but many of them go beyond the scope of this chapter.

The server replies to the ClientHello message with several messages :

• the ServerHello message that contains the protocol version chosen by the server (assumed to be the same as the client version in this chapter), the 32 random bytes chosen by the server, the Cipher Suite selected by the server from the list advertised by the client and a Session Id. This Session Id is an identifier which is chosen by the server and that identifies the TLS session and the security parameters (algorithms and keys) negotiated for this session. It is used to support session resumption.
• the Certificate message provides the certificate (or usually chain of certificates) that binds a domain name to the public key used by the server. TLS uses the server certificates to authenticate the server. It relies on a Public Key Infrastructure that is composed of a set of root certification authorities that issue certificates to certification authorities that in the end issue certificates to servers. TLS clients are usually configured with the public keys of the main root certification authorities and can use this information to validate the certificates that they receive from servers. For historical reasons, the TLS certificates are encoded in ASN.1 format. The details of the ASN.1 syntax [Dubuisson2000] are outside the scope of this book.
• the ServerKeyExchange message is used by the server to transmit the information that is required to perform the key exchange. The content of this message is function of the selected key exchange algorithm.
• the ServerHelloDone indicates that the server has sent all the messages for the first phase of the handshake.

At this point, it is time to describe the TLS key exchange. TLS supports different key exchange mechanisms that can be negotiated as part of the selection of the cipher suite. We focus on two of them to highlight their differences :

• RSA. This key exchange algorithm uses the encryption capabilities of the RSA public-key algorithm. The client has validated the server’s public key thanks to the Certificate message. It then generates a (48 bytes) random number, encrypts it with the server public key and sends the encrypted number to the server in the ClientKeyExchange message. The server uses its private key to decrypt the random number. At this point, the client and the server share the same (48 bytes long) secret and use it to derive the secret keys required to encrypt and authenticate data in the second phase. With this key exchange algorithm, the server does not need to send a ServerKeyExchange message.
• DHE_RSA. This key exchange algorithm is the Ephemeral Diffie Hellman key exchange with RSA signatures to authenticate the key exchange. It operates as a classical authenticated Diffie Hellman key exchange. If this key exchange has been selected by the server, it sends its Diffie Hellman parameters in the ServerKeyExchange message and signs them with its private key. The client then continues the key exchange and sends the results of its own computation in the ClientKeyExchange message. DHE_RSA is thus an authenticated Diffie Hellman key exchange where the initial message is sent by the server (instead of the client as in our first example but since the protocol is symmetric, this does not matter).

An important difference between DHE_RSA and RSA is their reaction against attacks. DHE_RSA is considered by many to be stronger than RSA because it supports Perfect Forward Secrecy. This property is important against attackers that are able to eavesdrop all the (encrypted) data sent and received by a server. Consider that Eve is such an attacker and that she has stored all the packets exchanged by Bob’s server during the last six months. If she manages, by any means, to obtain Bob’s private key, she will be able to decrypt all the keys used to secure the TLS sessions with Bob’s server during this period. With DHE_RSA, a similar attack is less devastating. If Eve knows Bob’s private, she will be able to launch a man-in-the-middle attack against the future TLS sessions with Bob’s server. However, she will not be able to recover the keys used for all the past sessions that she captured.

All the information required for the key exchange has now been transmitted. There are two important messages that will be sent by the client and the server to conclude the handshake and start the data transfer phase.

The client sends the ChangeCipherSpec message followed by the Finished message. The ChangeCipherSpec message indicates that the client has received all the information required to generate the security keys for this TLS session. This messages can also appear later in the session to indicate a change in the encryption algorithms that are used, but this usage is outside the scope of this book. The Finished message is more important. It confirms to the server that the TLS handshake has been performed correctly and that no attacker has been able to modify the data sent by the client or the server. This is the first message that is encrypted with the selected security keys. It contains a hash of all the messages that were exchanged during the handshake.

The server also sends a ChangeCipherSpec message followed by a Finished message.

The TLS record protocol¶

The handshake is now finished and the client and the server will exchange authenticate and encrypted records. TLS defines different formats for the records depending on the crypto algorithms that have been negotiated for the session. A detailed discussion of these different types of records is outside the scope of this introduction. For illustration, we briefly describe one record format.

As other security protocols, TLS uses different keys to encrypt and authenticate records. These keys are derived from the MasterSecret that is either randomly generated by the client with the RSA key exchange or derived from the Diffie Hellman parameters with the DH_RSA key exchange. The exact algorithm used to derive the keys is defined in RFC 5246.

A TLS record is always composed of four different fields :

• a Type that indicates the type of record. The most frequent type is application data which corresponds to a record containing encrypted data. The other types are handshake, change_cipher_spec and alert.
• a Protocol Version field that indicates the version of the TLS protocol used. This version is composed of two sub fields : a major and a minor version number.
• a Length field. A TLS record cannot be longer than 16,384 bytes.
• a TLSPlainText that contains the encrypted data

TLS supports several methods to generate the encrypted records. The selected method depends on the cryptographic algorithms that have been negotiated for the TLS session. A detailed presentation of the different methods that can be used to produce the TLSPlainText from the user data is outside the scope of this book. As an example, we study one method : Stream Encryption. This method is used with cryptographic algorithms which can operate on a stream of bytes. The method starts with a sequence of bytes provided by the user application : the plain text. The first step is to compute the authentication code to verify the integrity of the data. For this, TLS computes \(MAC(SeqNum, Header, PlainText)\) using HMAC where SeqNum is a sequence number which is incremented by one for each new TLS record transmitted. The Header is the header of the TLS record described above and PlainText is the information that needs to be encrypted. Note that the sequence number is maintained at the two endpoints of the TLS session, but it is not transmitted inside the TLS record. This sequence number is used to prevent replay attacks.

Footnotes