3 ms·

TIL that TLS (before 1.3) was designed by non-cryptographers. What the hell.

ivanr 2mo ago
You could argue that it was designed by one guy (Kipp Hickman) in three months: https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_131_the_legend_of_kipp_hickman https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_131_the_legend_o...
tialaramex 2mo ago
I shouldn't undersell it quite as much as I did, the original SSL concept comes from Taher Elgamal who was ex-RSA and had published the cryptosystem named after him. So it's not really true that there aren't any cryptographers in the room. However more importantly what TLS (and earlier SSL) wants to do is extremely hard and once Javascript comes into the picture it's ludicrously harder for this to deliver security than basically any system ordinary people have used. Several "But obviously I would never do that" scenarios you'd learn about in a cryptography class like "What if your adversary can control part of the messages to be encrypted?" or "What if your adversary can force you to transmit the same exact message thousands or millions of times?" are routine requirements of security for HTTPS because of how the Web works. And for SSL in particular why would math people (which is what cryptographers are) even be interested? 30+ Years Ago Tim's hypermedia system is just a toy and while its name, "World Wide Web" does sound like a big deal it's not actually important to your everyday life. If you live in a big city and it has a "web page" on Tim's system it's probably knocked together by some IT nerd who works for the city and the actual local government have no idea what a "web page" even is. Probably by the time TLS 1.2 shipped, the relevant IETF Working Group (also named TLS) could have reached out and asked cryptography researchers to help first and got some engagement because it's obvious this is a big deal, but that didn't happen until TLS 1.3

ivanr 2mo ago

You could argue that it was designed by one guy (Kipp Hickman) in three months: https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_131_the_legend_of_kipp_hickman https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_131_the_legend_o...

tialaramex 2mo ago

I shouldn't undersell it quite as much as I did, the original SSL concept comes from Taher Elgamal who was ex-RSA and had published the cryptosystem named after him. So it's not really true that there aren't any cryptographers in the room. However more importantly what TLS (and earlier SSL) wants to do is extremely hard and once Javascript comes into the picture it's ludicrously harder for this to deliver security than basically any system ordinary people have used. Several "But obviously I would never do that" scenarios you'd learn about in a cryptography class like "What if your adversary can control part of the messages to be encrypted?" or "What if your adversary can force you to transmit the same exact message thousands or millions of times?" are routine requirements of security for HTTPS because of how the Web works. And for SSL in particular why would math people (which is what cryptographers are) even be interested? 30+ Years Ago Tim's hypermedia system is just a toy and while its name, "World Wide Web" does sound like a big deal it's not actually important to your everyday life. If you live in a big city and it has a "web page" on Tim's system it's probably knocked together by some IT nerd who works for the city and the actual local government have no idea what a "web page" even is. Probably by the time TLS 1.2 shipped, the relevant IETF Working Group (also named TLS) could have reached out and asked cryptography researchers to help first and got some engagement because it's obvious this is a big deal, but that didn't happen until TLS 1.3