Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 approved by IETF With the 28th Draft

The much required Transport Layer Security version TLS 1.3 approved finally by IETF after 28 drafts. TLS 1.3 is not a minor redesign, it is a major redesign of TLS 1.2.

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open source community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers who collaborate to evaluate the standards.

TLS 1.2 was published in August 2008 after a long hold up as of March 21st, 2018, TLS 1.3 has now been concluded, after going into more than four years and 28 drafts. To explore drafts list.

TLS1.3 – Enhanced Security and Speed

Web connections depend on TLS for securing network traffic and TLS 1.3 be a big step to move forward in securing connections with enhanced performance.

With TLS 1.3 forward secrecy is mandatory, which ensures your sessions key will not be compromised even if the private key that present in the server is compromised.

TLS 1.3 removes old and unsafe cryptographic primitives, it is built using modern analytic techniques to be safer, it is always forward secure, it encrypts more data, and it is faster than TLS 1.2.

TLS 1.3 now removes obsolete and insecure features from TLS 1.2, including the following:

SHA-1

RC4

DES

3DES

AES-CBC

MD5

Arbitrary Diffie-Hellman groups — CVE-2016-0701

EXPORT-strength ciphers – Responsible for FREAK and LogJam

It includes new algorithms, such as ed25519, ed448, X25519, X448 ChaCha20/Poly1305.

The TLS 1.3 version requires only a single round trip to set up the connections which give enormous speed for new connections.

TLS 1.3 is designed for speed, specifically by reducing the number of network round-trips required before data can be sent to one round-trip (1-RTT) or even zero round-trips (0-RTT) for repeat connections.

TLS 1.3 brings changes in handling Server Name Identification “the SNI value is explicitly specified in the handshake, so the servers do not require to associate the SNI value in the ticket”.

Support for TLS 1.3 enabled from Chrome 56 and Firefox 52. There are Three TLS 1.3 servers to play with: https://enabled.tls13.com/, https://www.allizom.org/, and https://tls13.crypto.mozilla.org/.