Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 20 | Page 20

LATEST INTELLIGENCE WHAT DO YOU MEAN TLS 1.3 MIGHT DEGRADE MY SECURITY? PRESENTED BY Download whitepaper here 20 INTELLIGENTCIO T The Disruption-Defense Conundrum Transport Layer Security (TLS), formerly known as SSL, has become the de facto way of encrypting data in motion on networks. Unfortunately, several serious attacks have affected TLS over the past few years, and malware increasingly uses SSL/TLS sessions to hide, confident that security tools will neither inspect nor block its traffic. The very technology that makes the Internet secure can become a significant threat vector. As the volume of encrypted traffic continues to grow, organisations become even more vulnerable to encrypted attacks, hidden command and control channels, and unauthorised data exfiltration exploits that go undetected. For this reason, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has voted to approve an updated version – TLS 1.3 – of the standard. Some cryptographers believe the new standard will be faster and more secure. Enterprises, on the other hand, are right to be concerned about the implementation and availability issues TLS 1.3 might cause. That is because TLS 1.3 has removed certain visibility that was widely deployed for threat identification in TLS 1.2. Once again, InfoSec teams find themselves at the fulcrum of a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, encryption is moving towards ubiquity, but on the other hand, InfoSec teams need to be able to detect when threat actors use it too. What can you do? This whitepaper will delve into TLS, look at the security implications of TLS 1.3 and what you can do to prepare. What is TLS? TLS is the modern name for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), although both terms are still used interchangeably, although calling it SSL is technically incorrect. TLS is a standard to secure communications between a client and server, but more generally between clients and applications that typically sit over a reliable transport layer, such as TCP, although there have been adaptations to UDP as well. www.intelligentcio.com