From stateless to stateful: Generic authentication and authenticated encryption constructions with application to TLS

TLS channel analysis using authentication hierarchy

Abstract

Authentication and authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) are applied in cryptographic protocols to provide message integrity. The definitions in the literature and the constructions used in practice all protect against forgeries, but offer varying levels of protection against replays, reordering, and drops. As a result of the lack of a systematic hierarchy of authentication and AEAD security notions, gaps have arisen in the literature, specifically in the provable security analysis of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. We present a hierarchy of authentication and AEAD security notions, interpolating between the lowest level of protection (against forgeries) and the highest level (against forgeries, replays, reordering, and drops). We show generically how to construct higher level schemes from a basic scheme and appropriate use of sequence numbers, and apply that to close the gap in the analysis of TLS record layer encryption.

Keywords: authentication, authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD), Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, secure channels

Reference

Britta Hale, Colin Boyd, Stig Frode Mjølsnes, Douglas Stebila. From stateless to stateful: Generic authentication and authenticated encryption constructions with application to TLS. In Kazue Sako, editor, Topics in Cryptology — The Cryptographers' Track at the RSA Conference (CT-RSA) 2016, LNCS, vol. 9610, pp. 1-17. Springer, February 2016. © Sprigner.

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Funding

This research was supported by:
  • Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant DP130104304