Learn cryptographic protocol vocabulary: TLS 1.2 vs 1.3, cipher suites, perfect forward secrecy, certificate pinning, and enforcing minimum TLS versions.
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What is a key security improvement of TLS 1.3 over TLS 1.2?
TLS 1.3 mandates PFS (no RSA key exchange), removes vulnerable options (RC4, 3DES, SHA-1, MD5), and reduces the handshake to 1-RTT (or even 0-RTT for resumption). These changes eliminate entire classes of past TLS attacks.
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What is a 'cipher suite' in a TLS configuration?
A cipher suite is a set of algorithms that defines how a TLS connection will be secured: how keys are exchanged (ECDHE), how the server authenticates (RSA/ECDSA), what symmetric cipher encrypts data (AES-256-GCM), and what hash function provides integrity (SHA-384).
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What is 'perfect forward secrecy' (PFS)?
With PFS, session keys are derived from ephemeral (one-time) key exchanges. If an attacker later obtains the server's private key, they still cannot decrypt previously captured TLS sessions because the session keys were never stored.
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What is 'certificate pinning' and what risk does it mitigate?
Certificate pinning protects against rogue CA attacks: even if an attacker obtains a fraudulently issued certificate from a trusted CA, a pinned client rejects it because it doesn't match the pinned certificate/key. Used in high-security mobile apps.
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A security policy says 'we enforce TLS 1.3 minimum'. What does this mean operationally?
Enforcing a minimum TLS version means configuring servers to reject connections that negotiate lower versions. This is done in web server config (Nginx: ssl_protocols TLSv1.3; Apache: SSLProtocol TLSv1.3), load balancers, and CDN settings.