Section 17.4. Recommended Reading and Web Sites

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17.4. Recommended Reading and Web Sites

[RESC01] is a good detailed treatment of SSL and TLS.

The best-detailed overview of SET is in Book 1 of the specification, available at the MasterCard SET Web site. Another excellent overview is [MACG97]. [DREW99] is also a good source.

DREW99 Drew, G. Using SET for Secure Electronic Commerce . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

MACG97 Macgregor, R.; Ezvan, C.; Liguori, L.; and Han, J. Secure Electronic Transactions: Credit Card Payment on the Web in Theory and Practice . IBM RedBook SG24-4978-00, 1997. Available at www.redbooks.ibm.com.

RESC01 Rescorla, E. SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2001.

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Recommended Web Sites

Netscape's SSL Page: Contains the SSL specification.
Transport Layer Security Charter: Latest RFCs and Internet drafts for TLS.
OpenSSL Project: Project to develop open -source SSL and TLS software. Site includes documents and links.

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17.5. Key Terms, Review Questions, and Problems

Key Terms

acquirer

cardholder

certification authority (CA)

dual signature

issuer

merchant

payment gateway

Secure Electronic Transaction (SET)

Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

Transport Layer Security (TLS)

Review Questions

17.1	What are the advantages of each of the three approaches shown in Figure 17.1?
17.2	What protocols comprise SSL?
17.3	What is the difference between an SSL connection and an SSL session?
17.4	List and briefly define the parameters that define an SSL session state.
17.5	List and briefly define the parameters that define an SSL session connection.
17.6	What services are provided by the SSL Record Protocol?
17.7	What steps are involved in the SSL Record Protocol transmission?
17.8	List and briefly define the principal categories of SET participants .
17.9	What is a dual signature and what is its purpose?

Problems

17.1

In SSL and TLS, why is there a separate Change Cipher Spec Protocol, rather than including a change_cipher_spec message in the Handshake Protocol?

17.2

Consider the following threats to Web security and describe how each is countered by a particular feature of SSL.

Brute-Force Cryptanalytic Attack: An exhaustive search of the key space for a conventional encryption algorithm.
Known Plaintext Dictionary Attack: Many messages will contain predictable plaintext, such as the HTTP GET command. An attacker constructs a dictionary containing every possible encryption of the known-plaintext message. When an encrypted message is intercepted, the attacker takes the portion containing the encrypted known plaintext and looks up the ciphertext in the dictionary. The ciphertext should match against an entry that was encrypted with the same secret key. If there are several matches, each of these can be tried against the full ciphertext to determine the right one. This attack is especially effective against small key sizes (e.g., 40-bit keys).

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Replay Attack: Earlier SSL handshake messages are replayed.
Man-in-the-Middle Attack: An attacker interposes during key exchange, acting as the client to the server and as the server to the client.
Password Sniffing: Passwords in HTTP or other application traffic are eavesdropped.
IP Spoofing: Uses forged IP addresses to fool a host into accepting bogus data.
IP Hijacking: An active, authenticated connection between two hosts is disrupted and the attacker takes the place of one of the hosts .
SYN Flooding: An attacker sends TCP SYN messages to request a connection but does not respond to the final message to establish the connection fully. The attacked TCP module typically leaves the " half- open connection" around for a few minutes. Repeated SYN messages can clog the TCP module.

17.3

Based on what you have learned in this chapter, is it possible in SSL for the receiver to reorder SSL record blocks that arrive out of order? If so, explain how it can be done. If not, why not?