Transport Layer Security (TLS) Gets Crypto Agility Through Delegated Credentials
Delegated Credentials for TLS
Points to note…
+ For the past three years, we have been working with peers in the industry to solve a specific shared problem in the TLS infrastructure space: How do you terminate TLS connections while storing keys remotely and maintaining performance and availability?
“We believe delegated credentials provide an effective way to boost security by reducing certificate lifetimes without sacrificing reliability. This will soon become an Internet standard and we hope others in the industry adopt delegated credentials to help make the Internet ecosystem more secure.”
+ In TLS, there are three main areas of experimentation: ciphers, key exchange algorithms, and authentication algorithms. Ciphers and key exchange algorithms are only dependent on two parties: the client and the server. This freedom allows us to deploy exciting new choices like ChaCha20-Poly1305 or post-quantum key agreement in lockstep with browsers. On the other hand, the authentication algorithms used in TLS are dependent on certificates, which introduces certificate authorities and the entire public key infrastructure into the mix.
+ Unfortunately, the public key infrastructure is very conservative in its choice of algorithms, making it harder to adopt newer cryptography for authentication algorithms in TLS. For instance, EdDSA, a highly-regarded signature scheme, is not supported by certificate authorities, and root programs limit the certificates that will be signed. With the emergence of quantum computing, experimenting with new algorithms is essential to determine which solutions are deployable and functional on the Internet.
+ Since delegated credentials introduce the ability to use new authentication key types without requiring changes to certificates themselves, this opens up a new area of experimentation. Delegated credentials can be used to provide a level of flexibility in the transition to post-quantum cryptography, by enabling new algorithms and modes of operation to coexist with the existing PKI infrastructure. It also enables tiny victories, like the ability to use smaller, faster Ed25519 signatures in TLS.
Source: CLOUDFLARE. Nick Sullivan and Watson Ladd, Delegated Credentials for TLS…
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