Subjects -> Computer Networks -> Lectures -> Lecture #19

Lecture 19: Encryption #3 -- Practical Encryption

Key Certification

In the last tutorial, we saw an example of a "man-in-the-middle" attack -- Trudy convinces Bob that her (Trudy's) public key is that of Alice, and Bob is none the wiser. Public key systems are vulnerable to varieties of such attacks whenever the validity of a public key cannot be positively verified.

This problem can be solved by the use of a Certificate Authority, or CA. A CA is a trusted intermediary who certifies a public key as follows:

The CA first verifies the identity of the person or organisation seeking to have their public key certified. How this happens is up to the CA itself -- we simply have to trust that their methods are sufficient.
The verified applicant's public key is incorporated into an X.509 certificate. The certificate contains, in addition to the public key, the "distinguished name" of the applicant (sufficient to uniquely identify them), plus some other stuff. The certificate is digitally signed by the trusted CA's private key.

The CA's public key can subsequently be used by anyone to verify the validity (and truth) of the certificate, and thus can verify its holder's public key. For this to work, the CA's public key must be widely disseminated in such a way that everyone knows it and trusts that it is, indeed, the public key of the CA that it purports to be. It should be so well-known and widely available as to become "common knowledge" -- any attempt to fraudulently represent another key as being that of the CA should be easily detectable.

Typical Certificates

As we shall see, one of the most common uses of CA-signed X.509 certificates is in Web Commerce, where they are normally called site certificates. An X.509 certificate encodes a variety of information using ASN.1 (see later) non-text syntax, and is not "human-readable", however software allows us to extract the content from a certificate. Here are two (fairly dated) examples:

NB: Web browsers normally are configured to trust a small set of CAs (or certificate issuers) -- either by configuration (via a Preferences option), or (in earlier versions) established at compile-time.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

Internet Web-based commerce ("E-Commerce") relies for security on a hybrid symmetric/public key system called SSL, originally developed by Netscape, but widely adopted by others. SSL adds a new protocol layer between the application and transport (TCP) layers. It provides the following:

Authentication of identity of server, using an X.509 site certificate as above. Recall that the sample certificates contain the domain name of their owner -- this can be checked against the sitename which supplied the certificate, so that we know that we are, for example, connecting to www.amazon.com and not hackers-r-us.com masquerading as them.
Optional (and rarely used) authentication of client. The protocol has provision for the initiating client to identify him/herself with a personal certificate. This has potential usefulness in future (so-called) "Business-to-business" E-Commerce applications.
Encryption of HTTP session, whereby all subsequent communication between the client and server is secured using a negotiated symmetric session key.

SSL Protocol

An SSL session is (as usual) initiated by the client, by connecting to a server on port 443:

The initial connection ("Hello") message contains details of the client's preferred symmetric encryption algorithms -- SSL provides for a large number of different technologies -- so that the two parties can negotiate the use of a a common algorithm.
The server's response consists of an X.509 site certificate containing its public key and some other stuff, as well as its preferred symmetric algorithms.
The client verifies the contents of the server's site certificate, by checking both its contents (domain name, date, etc) and that it has been signed by a known and trusted CA. It also chooses an acceptable symmetric algorithm from those available.
The client generates a new, random "session key" appropriate to the negotiated symmetric algorithm. This is encrypted using the server's public key and sent back to the server.
All subsequent HTTP traffic between the client and the browser is encrypted using the session key.

Certificate Authorities and PKI

Most Web-based E-Commerce SSL sites purchase site certificates from a commercial provider such as Verisign, Thawte and many others. In future, a Public Key Infrastructure will be needed to manage aspects of certificate chains.

More complex applications will involve certificates issued (for example) for use within an organisation, or department. In this case, a certificate is signed by its issuer. In order to establish the validity of the issuer's signature, the application may need to obtain the issuer's CA certificate as well, which is, in turn, signed by the next higher authority -- verifying a certificate chain. Note that the root CA is implicitly trusted -- as soon as the client software encounters a certificate signed by this CA, authentication is complete.

The protocols and procedures for issuing, managing and revoking signatures, certificates and registration authorities are still under development. Watch this space...

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)

The history of PGP is outside the scope of our unit, but is well documented. PGP is a free, "clean room" implementation of the original RSA public key cryptosystem, created with the honourable intention of facilitating encrypted email. It has become the most widely used public key software in the world.

PGP can operate in two modes: either encrypting a message where both authentication and secrecy are required, or simply signing a message if only authentication and message integrity are required.

PGP encryption is actually a hybrid symmetric/public key system. A new session key is created for each encryption, and is used to encrypt the document, using a standard algorithm such as 3-DES or IDEA. The session key is then encrypted with the recipient's public key, and the two items are rolled together into a single package. The receiver can use his private key to decrypt the session key, and thus recover the original message:

This approach combines the best features of symmetric and public key encryption.

PGP Digital Signatures

PGP uses the modern terminology for digital signatures, where the document itself is not encrypted, but an encrypted message digest is appended for transmission:

It's obvious that it is possible to both sign and encrypt a document in PGP if required. Exercise: how?

PGP Key Management

PGP has the same difficulty as other public key systems: how to distribute keys in such a way as to avoid a successful "man-in-the-middle" attack. In commercial RSA-based products (such as SSL for Web-based E-Commerce) the solution is commercial Certificate Authorities. PGP adopts a more "low-tech" (but highly effective) approach called a Web of Trust.

PGP implements certificates, exactly analogous to the X.509 certificates discussed earlier -- in fact, PGP can use X.509 certificates. The PGP certificate extends to allowing multiple signatures, which allows several people to independently attest that the certificate is genuine. In the PKI slide, earlier, the trust model was hierarchic. In PGP it is cumulative -- a certificate gains authority as more people sign it. A signer for a certificate becomes an introducer for that certificate. For example, if you trust me, and I appear as an introducer of a new certificate, then you will tend to trust the certificate as well -- as in: "I trust him, and he trusts the other guy, so I guess I trust the other guy as well..." Trust becomes transitive.

In the early days of PGP, an initial Web of Trust was established by holding PGP signing parties, where people would identify themselves to others, and then sign their certificates. PGP also has the notion of complete trust and marginal trust, in addition to untrusted certificates.

More Information

The links in the body of this lecture were primary sources. The following might also be useful:

http://www.pgpi.org/doc/pgpintro/
http://world.std.com/~cme/html/web.html
http://www.rubin.ch/pgp/weboftrust.en.html
http://home.netscape.com/security/basics/index.html
http://home.netscape.com/ja/newsref/ref/internet-security.html
http://www.netcraft.co.uk/cgi-bin/Survey/sslwhats
http://pebble.bbntech.com/docs/SSL.doc.html
http://www.apacheweek.com/features/ssl
In VeriSign We Trust

The tutorial for this lecture is Tutorial #19.
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