Short-Lived Forward-Secure Delegation for TLS

Lukas Alber*, Stefan More*, Sebastian Ramacher*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paperpeer-review

Abstract

On today's Internet, combining the end-to-end security of TLS with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) while ensuring the authenticity of connections results in a challenging delegation problem. When CDN servers provide content, they have to authenticate themselves as the origin server to establish a valid end-to-end TLS connection with the client. In standard TLS, the latter requires access to the secret key of the server. To curb this problem, multiple workarounds exist to realize a delegation of the authentication. In this paper, we present a solution that renders key sharing unnecessary and reduces the need for workarounds. By adapting identity-based signatures to this setting, our solution offers short-lived delegations. Additionally, by enabling forward-security, existing delegations remain valid even if the server's secret key leaks. We provide an implementation of the scheme and discuss integration into a TLS stack. In our evaluation, we show that an efficient implementation incurs less overhead than a typical network round trip. Thereby, we propose an alternative approach to current delegation practices on the web.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCCSW 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Cloud Computing Security Workshop
Place of PublicationVirtual Event, USA
Pages119-132
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450380843
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 9 Nov 2020
EventThe ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security: CCS 2020 - Virtual Event, Virtuell, United States
Duration: 9 Nov 2020 → …
https://ccsw.io/

Publication series

NameCCSW 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Cloud Computing Security Workshop

Workshop

WorkshopThe ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Abbreviated titleCCSW'20
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtuell
Period9/11/20 → …
Internet address

Keywords

  • delegated credentials
  • identity-based signatures

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science(all)
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Fields of Expertise

  • Information, Communication & Computing

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