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rfc5246.txt
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Network Working Group T. Dierks
Request for Comments: 5246 Independent
Obsoletes: 3268, 4346, 4366 E. Rescorla
Updates: 4492 RTFM, Inc.
Category: Standards Track August 2008
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
Version 1.2
Status of This Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
This document specifies Version 1.2 of the Transport Layer Security
(TLS) protocol. The TLS protocol provides communications security
over the Internet. The protocol allows client/server applications to
communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping,
tampering, or message forgery.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................4
1.1. Requirements Terminology ...................................5
1.2. Major Differences from TLS 1.1 .............................5
2. Goals ...........................................................6
3. Goals of This Document ..........................................7
4. Presentation Language ...........................................7
4.1. Basic Block Size ...........................................7
4.2. Miscellaneous ..............................................8
4.3. Vectors ....................................................8
4.4. Numbers ....................................................9
4.5. Enumerateds ................................................9
4.6. Constructed Types .........................................10
4.6.1. Variants ...........................................10
4.7. Cryptographic Attributes ..................................12
4.8. Constants .................................................14
5. HMAC and the Pseudorandom Function .............................14
6. The TLS Record Protocol ........................................15
6.1. Connection States .........................................16
6.2. Record Layer ..............................................19
6.2.1. Fragmentation ......................................19
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
6.2.2. Record Compression and Decompression ...............20
6.2.3. Record Payload Protection ..........................21
6.2.3.1. Null or Standard Stream Cipher ............22
6.2.3.2. CBC Block Cipher ..........................22
6.2.3.3. AEAD Ciphers ..............................24
6.3. Key Calculation ...........................................25
7. The TLS Handshaking Protocols ..................................26
7.1. Change Cipher Spec Protocol ...............................27
7.2. Alert Protocol ............................................28
7.2.1. Closure Alerts .....................................29
7.2.2. Error Alerts .......................................30
7.3. Handshake Protocol Overview ...............................33
7.4. Handshake Protocol ........................................37
7.4.1. Hello Messages .....................................38
7.4.1.1. Hello Request .............................38
7.4.1.2. Client Hello ..............................39
7.4.1.3. Server Hello ..............................42
7.4.1.4. Hello Extensions ..........................44
7.4.1.4.1. Signature Algorithms ...........45
7.4.2. Server Certificate .................................47
7.4.3. Server Key Exchange Message ........................50
7.4.4. Certificate Request ................................53
7.4.5. Server Hello Done ..................................55
7.4.6. Client Certificate .................................55
7.4.7. Client Key Exchange Message ........................57
7.4.7.1. RSA-Encrypted Premaster Secret Message ....58
7.4.7.2. Client Diffie-Hellman Public Value ........61
7.4.8. Certificate Verify .................................62
7.4.9. Finished ...........................................63
8. Cryptographic Computations .....................................64
8.1. Computing the Master Secret ...............................64
8.1.1. RSA ................................................65
8.1.2. Diffie-Hellman .....................................65
9. Mandatory Cipher Suites ........................................65
10. Application Data Protocol .....................................65
11. Security Considerations .......................................65
12. IANA Considerations ...........................................65
Appendix A. Protocol Data Structures and Constant Values ..........68
A.1. Record Layer ..............................................68
A.2. Change Cipher Specs Message ...............................69
A.3. Alert Messages ............................................69
A.4. Handshake Protocol ........................................70
A.4.1. Hello Messages .....................................71
A.4.2. Server Authentication and Key Exchange Messages ....72
A.4.3. Client Authentication and Key Exchange Messages ....74
A.4.4. Handshake Finalization Message .....................74
A.5. The Cipher Suite ..........................................75
A.6. The Security Parameters ...................................77
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 2]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
A.7. Changes to RFC 4492 .......................................78
Appendix B. Glossary ..............................................78
Appendix C. Cipher Suite Definitions ..............................83
Appendix D. Implementation Notes ..................................85
D.1. Random Number Generation and Seeding ......................85
D.2. Certificates and Authentication ...........................85
D.3. Cipher Suites .............................................85
D.4. Implementation Pitfalls ...................................85
Appendix E. Backward Compatibility ................................87
E.1. Compatibility with TLS 1.0/1.1 and SSL 3.0 ................87
E.2. Compatibility with SSL 2.0 ................................88
E.3. Avoiding Man-in-the-Middle Version Rollback ...............90
Appendix F. Security Analysis .....................................91
F.1. Handshake Protocol ........................................91
F.1.1. Authentication and Key Exchange ....................91
F.1.1.1. Anonymous Key Exchange ....................91
F.1.1.2. RSA Key Exchange and Authentication .......92
F.1.1.3. Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange with
Authentication ............................92
F.1.2. Version Rollback Attacks ...........................93
F.1.3. Detecting Attacks Against the Handshake Protocol ...94
F.1.4. Resuming Sessions ..................................94
F.2. Protecting Application Data ...............................94
F.3. Explicit IVs ..............................................95
F.4. Security of Composite Cipher Modes ........................95
F.5. Denial of Service .........................................96
F.6. Final Notes ...............................................96
Normative References ..............................................97
Informative References ............................................98
Working Group Information ........................................101
Contributors .....................................................101
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 3]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
1. Introduction
The primary goal of the TLS protocol is to provide privacy and data
integrity between two communicating applications. The protocol is
composed of two layers: the TLS Record Protocol and the TLS Handshake
Protocol. At the lowest level, layered on top of some reliable
transport protocol (e.g., TCP [TCP]), is the TLS Record Protocol.
The TLS Record Protocol provides connection security that has two
basic properties:
- The connection is private. Symmetric cryptography is used for
data encryption (e.g., AES [AES], RC4 [SCH], etc.). The keys for
this symmetric encryption are generated uniquely for each
connection and are based on a secret negotiated by another
protocol (such as the TLS Handshake Protocol). The Record
Protocol can also be used without encryption.
- The connection is reliable. Message transport includes a message
integrity check using a keyed MAC. Secure hash functions (e.g.,
SHA-1, etc.) are used for MAC computations. The Record Protocol
can operate without a MAC, but is generally only used in this mode
while another protocol is using the Record Protocol as a transport
for negotiating security parameters.
The TLS Record Protocol is used for encapsulation of various higher-
level protocols. One such encapsulated protocol, the TLS Handshake
Protocol, allows the server and client to authenticate each other and
to negotiate an encryption algorithm and cryptographic keys before
the application protocol transmits or receives its first byte of
data. The TLS Handshake Protocol provides connection security that
has three basic properties:
- The peer's identity can be authenticated using asymmetric, or
public key, cryptography (e.g., RSA [RSA], DSA [DSS], etc.). This
authentication can be made optional, but is generally required for
at least one of the peers.
- The negotiation of a shared secret is secure: the negotiated
secret is unavailable to eavesdroppers, and for any authenticated
connection the secret cannot be obtained, even by an attacker who
can place himself in the middle of the connection.
- The negotiation is reliable: no attacker can modify the
negotiation communication without being detected by the parties to
the communication.
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 4]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
One advantage of TLS is that it is application protocol independent.
Higher-level protocols can layer on top of the TLS protocol
transparently. The TLS standard, however, does not specify how
protocols add security with TLS; the decisions on how to initiate TLS
handshaking and how to interpret the authentication certificates
exchanged are left to the judgment of the designers and implementors
of protocols that run on top of TLS.
1.1. Requirements Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [REQ].
1.2. Major Differences from TLS 1.1
This document is a revision of the TLS 1.1 [TLS1.1] protocol which
contains improved flexibility, particularly for negotiation of
cryptographic algorithms. The major changes are:
- The MD5/SHA-1 combination in the pseudorandom function (PRF) has
been replaced with cipher-suite-specified PRFs. All cipher suites
in this document use P_SHA256.
- The MD5/SHA-1 combination in the digitally-signed element has been
replaced with a single hash. Signed elements now include a field
that explicitly specifies the hash algorithm used.
- Substantial cleanup to the client's and server's ability to
specify which hash and signature algorithms they will accept.
Note that this also relaxes some of the constraints on signature
and hash algorithms from previous versions of TLS.
- Addition of support for authenticated encryption with additional
data modes.
- TLS Extensions definition and AES Cipher Suites were merged in
from external [TLSEXT] and [TLSAES].
- Tighter checking of EncryptedPreMasterSecret version numbers.
- Tightened up a number of requirements.
- Verify_data length now depends on the cipher suite (default is
still 12).
- Cleaned up description of Bleichenbacher/Klima attack defenses.
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 5]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
- Alerts MUST now be sent in many cases.
- After a certificate_request, if no certificates are available,
clients now MUST send an empty certificate list.
- TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA is now the mandatory to implement
cipher suite.
- Added HMAC-SHA256 cipher suites.
- Removed IDEA and DES cipher suites. They are now deprecated and
will be documented in a separate document.
- Support for the SSLv2 backward-compatible hello is now a MAY, not
a SHOULD, with sending it a SHOULD NOT. Support will probably
become a SHOULD NOT in the future.
- Added limited "fall-through" to the presentation language to allow
multiple case arms to have the same encoding.
- Added an Implementation Pitfalls sections
- The usual clarifications and editorial work.
2. Goals
The goals of the TLS protocol, in order of priority, are as follows:
1. Cryptographic security: TLS should be used to establish a secure
connection between two parties.
2. Interoperability: Independent programmers should be able to
develop applications utilizing TLS that can successfully exchange
cryptographic parameters without knowledge of one another's code.
3. Extensibility: TLS seeks to provide a framework into which new
public key and bulk encryption methods can be incorporated as
necessary. This will also accomplish two sub-goals: preventing
the need to create a new protocol (and risking the introduction of
possible new weaknesses) and avoiding the need to implement an
entire new security library.
4. Relative efficiency: Cryptographic operations tend to be highly
CPU intensive, particularly public key operations. For this
reason, the TLS protocol has incorporated an optional session
caching scheme to reduce the number of connections that need to be
established from scratch. Additionally, care has been taken to
reduce network activity.
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 6]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
3. Goals of This Document
This document and the TLS protocol itself are based on the SSL 3.0
Protocol Specification as published by Netscape. The differences
between this protocol and SSL 3.0 are not dramatic, but they are
significant enough that the various versions of TLS and SSL 3.0 do
not interoperate (although each protocol incorporates a mechanism by
which an implementation can back down to prior versions). This
document is intended primarily for readers who will be implementing
the protocol and for those doing cryptographic analysis of it. The
specification has been written with this in mind, and it is intended
to reflect the needs of those two groups. For that reason, many of
the algorithm-dependent data structures and rules are included in the
body of the text (as opposed to in an appendix), providing easier
access to them.
This document is not intended to supply any details of service
definition or of interface definition, although it does cover select
areas of policy as they are required for the maintenance of solid
security.
4. Presentation Language
This document deals with the formatting of data in an external
representation. The following very basic and somewhat casually
defined presentation syntax will be used. The syntax draws from
several sources in its structure. Although it resembles the
programming language "C" in its syntax and XDR [XDR] in both its
syntax and intent, it would be risky to draw too many parallels. The
purpose of this presentation language is to document TLS only; it has
no general application beyond that particular goal.
4.1. Basic Block Size
The representation of all data items is explicitly specified. The
basic data block size is one byte (i.e., 8 bits). Multiple byte data
items are concatenations of bytes, from left to right, from top to
bottom. From the byte stream, a multi-byte item (a numeric in the
example) is formed (using C notation) by:
value = (byte[0] << 8*(n-1)) | (byte[1] << 8*(n-2)) |
... | byte[n-1];
This byte ordering for multi-byte values is the commonplace network
byte order or big-endian format.
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 7]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
4.2. Miscellaneous
Comments begin with "/*" and end with "*/".
Optional components are denoted by enclosing them in "[[ ]]" double
brackets.
Single-byte entities containing uninterpreted data are of type
opaque.
4.3. Vectors
A vector (single-dimensioned array) is a stream of homogeneous data
elements. The size of the vector may be specified at documentation
time or left unspecified until runtime. In either case, the length
declares the number of bytes, not the number of elements, in the
vector. The syntax for specifying a new type, T', that is a fixed-
length vector of type T is
T T'[n];
Here, T' occupies n bytes in the data stream, where n is a multiple
of the size of T. The length of the vector is not included in the
encoded stream.
In the following example, Datum is defined to be three consecutive
bytes that the protocol does not interpret, while Data is three
consecutive Datum, consuming a total of nine bytes.
opaque Datum[3]; /* three uninterpreted bytes */
Datum Data[9]; /* 3 consecutive 3 byte vectors */
Variable-length vectors are defined by specifying a subrange of legal
lengths, inclusively, using the notation <floor..ceiling>. When
these are encoded, the actual length precedes the vector's contents
in the byte stream. The length will be in the form of a number
consuming as many bytes as required to hold the vector's specified
maximum (ceiling) length. A variable-length vector with an actual
length field of zero is referred to as an empty vector.
T T'<floor..ceiling>;
In the following example, mandatory is a vector that must contain
between 300 and 400 bytes of type opaque. It can never be empty.
The actual length field consumes two bytes, a uint16, which is
sufficient to represent the value 400 (see Section 4.4). On the
other hand, longer can represent up to 800 bytes of data, or 400
uint16 elements, and it may be empty. Its encoding will include a
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 8]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
two-byte actual length field prepended to the vector. The length of
an encoded vector must be an even multiple of the length of a single
element (for example, a 17-byte vector of uint16 would be illegal).
opaque mandatory<300..400>;
/* length field is 2 bytes, cannot be empty */
uint16 longer<0..800>;
/* zero to 400 16-bit unsigned integers */
4.4. Numbers
The basic numeric data type is an unsigned byte (uint8). All larger
numeric data types are formed from fixed-length series of bytes
concatenated as described in Section 4.1 and are also unsigned. The
following numeric types are predefined.
uint8 uint16[2];
uint8 uint24[3];
uint8 uint32[4];
uint8 uint64[8];
All values, here and elsewhere in the specification, are stored in
network byte (big-endian) order; the uint32 represented by the hex
bytes 01 02 03 04 is equivalent to the decimal value 16909060.
Note that in some cases (e.g., DH parameters) it is necessary to
represent integers as opaque vectors. In such cases, they are
represented as unsigned integers (i.e., leading zero octets are not
required even if the most significant bit is set).
4.5. Enumerateds
An additional sparse data type is available called enum. A field of
type enum can only assume the values declared in the definition.
Each definition is a different type. Only enumerateds of the same
type may be assigned or compared. Every element of an enumerated
must be assigned a value, as demonstrated in the following example.
Since the elements of the enumerated are not ordered, they can be
assigned any unique value, in any order.
enum { e1(v1), e2(v2), ... , en(vn) [[, (n)]] } Te;
An enumerated occupies as much space in the byte stream as would its
maximal defined ordinal value. The following definition would cause
one byte to be used to carry fields of type Color.
enum { red(3), blue(5), white(7) } Color;
Dierks & Rescorla Standards Track [Page 9]
RFC 5246 TLS August 2008
One may optionally specify a value without its associated tag to
force the width definition without defining a superfluous element.
In the following example, Taste will consume two bytes in the data
stream but can only assume the values 1, 2, or 4.
enum { sweet(1), sour(2), bitter(4), (32000) } Taste;
The names of the elements of an enumeration are scoped within the
defined type. In the first example, a fully qualified reference to
the second element of the enumeration would be Color.blue. Such
qualification is not required if the target of the assignment is well
specified.
Color color = Color.blue; /* overspecified, legal */
Color color = blue; /* correct, type implicit */
For enumerateds that are never converted to external representation,
the numerical information may be omitted.
enum { low, medium, high } Amount;
4.6. Constructed Types
Structure types may be constructed from primitive types for
convenience. Each specification declares a new, unique type. The
syntax for definition is much like that of C.
struct {
T1 f1;
T2 f2;
...
Tn fn;
} [[T]];
The fields within a structure may be qualified using the type's name,
with a syntax much like that available for enumerateds. For example,
T.f2 refers to the second field of the previous declaration.
Structure definitions may be embedded.
4.6.1. Variants
Defined structures may have variants based on some knowledge that is
available within the environment. The selector must be an enumerated
type that defines the possible variants the structure defines. There
must be a case arm for every element of the enumeration declared in
the select. Case arms have limited fall-through: if two case arms
follow in immediate succession with no fields in between, then they
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both contain the same fields. Thus, in the example below, "orange"
and "banana" both contain V2. Note that this is a new piece of
syntax in TLS 1.2.
The body of the variant structure may be given a label for reference.
The mechanism by which the variant is selected at runtime is not
prescribed by the presentation language.
struct {
T1 f1;
T2 f2;
....
Tn fn;
select (E) {
case e1: Te1;
case e2: Te2;
case e3: case e4: Te3;
....
case en: Ten;
} [[fv]];
} [[Tv]];
For example:
enum { apple, orange, banana } VariantTag;
struct {
uint16 number;
opaque string<0..10>; /* variable length */
} V1;
struct {
uint32 number;
opaque string[10]; /* fixed length */
} V2;
struct {
select (VariantTag) { /* value of selector is implicit */
case apple:
V1; /* VariantBody, tag = apple */
case orange:
case banana:
V2; /* VariantBody, tag = orange or banana */
} variant_body; /* optional label on variant */
} VariantRecord;
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4.7. Cryptographic Attributes
The five cryptographic operations -- digital signing, stream cipher
encryption, block cipher encryption, authenticated encryption with
additional data (AEAD) encryption, and public key encryption -- are
designated digitally-signed, stream-ciphered, block-ciphered, aead-
ciphered, and public-key-encrypted, respectively. A field's
cryptographic processing is specified by prepending an appropriate
key word designation before the field's type specification.
Cryptographic keys are implied by the current session state (see
Section 6.1).
A digitally-signed element is encoded as a struct DigitallySigned:
struct {
SignatureAndHashAlgorithm algorithm;
opaque signature<0..2^16-1>;
} DigitallySigned;
The algorithm field specifies the algorithm used (see Section
7.4.1.4.1 for the definition of this field). Note that the
introduction of the algorithm field is a change from previous
versions. The signature is a digital signature using those
algorithms over the contents of the element. The contents themselves
do not appear on the wire but are simply calculated. The length of
the signature is specified by the signing algorithm and key.
In RSA signing, the opaque vector contains the signature generated
using the RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signature scheme defined in [PKCS1]. As
discussed in [PKCS1], the DigestInfo MUST be DER-encoded [X680]
[X690]. For hash algorithms without parameters (which includes
SHA-1), the DigestInfo.AlgorithmIdentifier.parameters field MUST be
NULL, but implementations MUST accept both without parameters and
with NULL parameters. Note that earlier versions of TLS used a
different RSA signature scheme that did not include a DigestInfo
encoding.
In DSA, the 20 bytes of the SHA-1 hash are run directly through the
Digital Signing Algorithm with no additional hashing. This produces
two values, r and s. The DSA signature is an opaque vector, as
above, the contents of which are the DER encoding of:
Dss-Sig-Value ::= SEQUENCE {
r INTEGER,
s INTEGER
}
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Note: In current terminology, DSA refers to the Digital Signature
Algorithm and DSS refers to the NIST standard. In the original SSL
and TLS specs, "DSS" was used universally. This document uses "DSA"
to refer to the algorithm, "DSS" to refer to the standard, and it
uses "DSS" in the code point definitions for historical continuity.
In stream cipher encryption, the plaintext is exclusive-ORed with an
identical amount of output generated from a cryptographically secure
keyed pseudorandom number generator.
In block cipher encryption, every block of plaintext encrypts to a
block of ciphertext. All block cipher encryption is done in CBC
(Cipher Block Chaining) mode, and all items that are block-ciphered
will be an exact multiple of the cipher block length.
In AEAD encryption, the plaintext is simultaneously encrypted and
integrity protected. The input may be of any length, and aead-
ciphered output is generally larger than the input in order to
accommodate the integrity check value.
In public key encryption, a public key algorithm is used to encrypt
data in such a way that it can be decrypted only with the matching
private key. A public-key-encrypted element is encoded as an opaque
vector <0..2^16-1>, where the length is specified by the encryption
algorithm and key.
RSA encryption is done using the RSAES-PKCS1-v1_5 encryption scheme
defined in [PKCS1].
In the following example
stream-ciphered struct {
uint8 field1;
uint8 field2;
digitally-signed opaque {
uint8 field3<0..255>;
uint8 field4;
};
} UserType;
The contents of the inner struct (field3 and field4) are used as
input for the signature/hash algorithm, and then the entire structure
is encrypted with a stream cipher. The length of this structure, in
bytes, would be equal to two bytes for field1 and field2, plus two
bytes for the signature and hash algorithm, plus two bytes for the
length of the signature, plus the length of the output of the signing
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algorithm. The length of the signature is known because the
algorithm and key used for the signing are known prior to encoding or
decoding this structure.
4.8. Constants
Typed constants can be defined for purposes of specification by
declaring a symbol of the desired type and assigning values to it.
Under-specified types (opaque, variable-length vectors, and
structures that contain opaque) cannot be assigned values. No fields
of a multi-element structure or vector may be elided.
For example:
struct {
uint8 f1;
uint8 f2;
} Example1;
Example1 ex1 = {1, 4}; /* assigns f1 = 1, f2 = 4 */
5. HMAC and the Pseudorandom Function
The TLS record layer uses a keyed Message Authentication Code (MAC)
to protect message integrity. The cipher suites defined in this
document use a construction known as HMAC, described in [HMAC], which
is based on a hash function. Other cipher suites MAY define their
own MAC constructions, if needed.
In addition, a construction is required to do expansion of secrets
into blocks of data for the purposes of key generation or validation.
This pseudorandom function (PRF) takes as input a secret, a seed, and
an identifying label and produces an output of arbitrary length.
In this section, we define one PRF, based on HMAC. This PRF with the
SHA-256 hash function is used for all cipher suites defined in this
document and in TLS documents published prior to this document when
TLS 1.2 is negotiated. New cipher suites MUST explicitly specify a
PRF and, in general, SHOULD use the TLS PRF with SHA-256 or a
stronger standard hash function.
First, we define a data expansion function, P_hash(secret, data),
that uses a single hash function to expand a secret and seed into an
arbitrary quantity of output:
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P_hash(secret, seed) = HMAC_hash(secret, A(1) + seed) +
HMAC_hash(secret, A(2) + seed) +
HMAC_hash(secret, A(3) + seed) + ...
where + indicates concatenation.
A() is defined as:
A(0) = seed
A(i) = HMAC_hash(secret, A(i-1))
P_hash can be iterated as many times as necessary to produce the
required quantity of data. For example, if P_SHA256 is being used to
create 80 bytes of data, it will have to be iterated three times
(through A(3)), creating 96 bytes of output data; the last 16 bytes
of the final iteration will then be discarded, leaving 80 bytes of
output data.
TLS's PRF is created by applying P_hash to the secret as:
PRF(secret, label, seed) = P_<hash>(secret, label + seed)
The label is an ASCII string. It should be included in the exact
form it is given without a length byte or trailing null character.
For example, the label "slithy toves" would be processed by hashing
the following bytes:
73 6C 69 74 68 79 20 74 6F 76 65 73
6. The TLS Record Protocol
The TLS Record Protocol is a layered protocol. At each layer,
messages may include fields for length, description, and content.
The Record Protocol takes messages to be transmitted, fragments the
data into manageable blocks, optionally compresses the data, applies
a MAC, encrypts, and transmits the result. Received data is
decrypted, verified, decompressed, reassembled, and then delivered to
higher-level clients.
Four protocols that use the record protocol are described in this
document: the handshake protocol, the alert protocol, the change
cipher spec protocol, and the application data protocol. In order to
allow extension of the TLS protocol, additional record content types
can be supported by the record protocol. New record content type
values are assigned by IANA in the TLS Content Type Registry as
described in Section 12.
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Implementations MUST NOT send record types not defined in this
document unless negotiated by some extension. If a TLS
implementation receives an unexpected record type, it MUST send an
unexpected_message alert.
Any protocol designed for use over TLS must be carefully designed to
deal with all possible attacks against it. As a practical matter,
this means that the protocol designer must be aware of what security
properties TLS does and does not provide and cannot safely rely on
the latter.
Note in particular that type and length of a record are not protected
by encryption. If this information is itself sensitive, application
designers may wish to take steps (padding, cover traffic) to minimize
information leakage.
6.1. Connection States
A TLS connection state is the operating environment of the TLS Record
Protocol. It specifies a compression algorithm, an encryption
algorithm, and a MAC algorithm. In addition, the parameters for
these algorithms are known: the MAC key and the bulk encryption keys
for the connection in both the read and the write directions.
Logically, there are always four connection states outstanding: the
current read and write states, and the pending read and write states.
All records are processed under the current read and write states.
The security parameters for the pending states can be set by the TLS
Handshake Protocol, and the ChangeCipherSpec can selectively make
either of the pending states current, in which case the appropriate
current state is disposed of and replaced with the pending state; the
pending state is then reinitialized to an empty state. It is illegal
to make a state that has not been initialized with security
parameters a current state. The initial current state always
specifies that no encryption, compression, or MAC will be used.
The security parameters for a TLS Connection read and write state are
set by providing the following values:
connection end
Whether this entity is considered the "client" or the "server" in
this connection.
PRF algorithm
An algorithm used to generate keys from the master secret (see
Sections 5 and 6.3).
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bulk encryption algorithm
An algorithm to be used for bulk encryption. This specification
includes the key size of this algorithm, whether it is a block,
stream, or AEAD cipher, the block size of the cipher (if
appropriate), and the lengths of explicit and implicit
initialization vectors (or nonces).
MAC algorithm
An algorithm to be used for message authentication. This
specification includes the size of the value returned by the MAC
algorithm.
compression algorithm
An algorithm to be used for data compression. This specification
must include all information the algorithm requires to do
compression.
master secret
A 48-byte secret shared between the two peers in the connection.
client random
A 32-byte value provided by the client.
server random
A 32-byte value provided by the server.
These parameters are defined in the presentation language as:
enum { server, client } ConnectionEnd;
enum { tls_prf_sha256 } PRFAlgorithm;
enum { null, rc4, 3des, aes }
BulkCipherAlgorithm;
enum { stream, block, aead } CipherType;
enum { null, hmac_md5, hmac_sha1, hmac_sha256,
hmac_sha384, hmac_sha512} MACAlgorithm;
enum { null(0), (255) } CompressionMethod;
/* The algorithms specified in CompressionMethod, PRFAlgorithm,
BulkCipherAlgorithm, and MACAlgorithm may be added to. */
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struct {
ConnectionEnd entity;
PRFAlgorithm prf_algorithm;
BulkCipherAlgorithm bulk_cipher_algorithm;
CipherType cipher_type;
uint8 enc_key_length;
uint8 block_length;
uint8 fixed_iv_length;
uint8 record_iv_length;
MACAlgorithm mac_algorithm;
uint8 mac_length;
uint8 mac_key_length;
CompressionMethod compression_algorithm;
opaque master_secret[48];
opaque client_random[32];
opaque server_random[32];
} SecurityParameters;
The record layer will use the security parameters to generate the
following six items (some of which are not required by all ciphers,
and are thus empty):
client write MAC key
server write MAC key
client write encryption key
server write encryption key
client write IV
server write IV
The client write parameters are used by the server when receiving and
processing records and vice versa. The algorithm used for generating
these items from the security parameters is described in Section 6.3.
Once the security parameters have been set and the keys have been
generated, the connection states can be instantiated by making them
the current states. These current states MUST be updated for each
record processed. Each connection state includes the following
elements:
compression state
The current state of the compression algorithm.