Transport-Layer Security and TLS
Stub. Transport-layer attacks (TCP sequence-number prediction/hijacking, SYN flooding) and TLS as the standard defense: the handshake (key exchange and authentication), certificate validation, and how it composes the cryptographic primitives — symmetric encryption, MACs, signatures, PKI — covered earlier into one protocol.
TCP has no authentication of its own, so an attacker who can predict (or observe) sequence numbers can inject or hijack a connection; SYN flooding abuses the connection-setup handshake itself to exhaust server resources. TLS is the answer layered on top: this note works through the TLS handshake as the payoff application of nearly every cryptographic primitive covered in this topic area at once — Diffie-Hellman (or an RSA-based variant) for key exchange, certificates/PKI for authenticating the server (and optionally the client), and the resulting shared secret used to derive symmetric encryption and MAC keys for the actual data, with the certificate-validation chain being the step most real-world TLS failures trace back to.
Outline (TODO — flesh out each)
- TCP sequence-number prediction and connection hijacking
- SYN flooding
- The TLS handshake — key exchange and server authentication
- Certificate validation
- Deriving and using session keys
- Common real-world TLS failure modes