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LURK: Secure & Efficient Server-Controlled TLS Delegation

We present the LURK (Limited Use of Remote Keys) extension for TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2, as a way to achieve safer TLS delegation.

By design, TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a 2-party, end-to-end protocol. Yet, in practice, TLS delegation is often deployed: that is, middlebox proxies inspect and even modify TLS traffic between the endpoints. Recently, industry-leaders (for example, Akamai, Cloudflare, Telefonica, Ericsson), standardization bodies (for example, IETF, ETSI), and academic researchers have proposed numerous ways of achieving safer TLS delegation. We present the LURK (Limited Use of Remote Keys) extension for TLS 1.2, a suite of designs for TLS delegation, where the TLS-server is aware of the middlebox. We implement and test LURK. We also cryptographically prove and formally verify, in Proverif, the security of LURK. Finally, we comprehensively analyze how our designs balance (provable) security and competitive performance.

Full abstract in IEEE Xplore, DOI:10.1109/TrustCom50675.2020.00036

Authors: 

Ioana Boureanu – University of Surrey

Daniel Migault, Stere Preda, Hyame Assem Alameddine – Ericsson Research

Sanjay Mishra – Verizon

Frederic Fieau – Orange

Mohammad Mannan – Concordia University

 

Presented at the 19th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2020, Guangzhou, China, December 29, 2020 - January 1, 2021.

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