Sunday, September 9, 2012

My thoughts on a new SSL protocol

The prevalence of encrypted traffic on the internet, network LANs/WANs, indicates that more and more people, companies, and even governments are trying to be more proactive in the protection of data. This also makes it harder for network security analyst to sometimes tell the good traffic from the "bad" traffic. If the analyst has authorization and the tools to do so, they can peek at the traffic and see what's going in and out.

However, I don't know that the majority of traffic analysts are authorized or have the tools to tear down these sessions in order to peak into them. There are obviously concerns that span everything from legal to real-time session tear downs that affect the actual session itself. Another concern is cost...how much can an organization spend on appliances that will provide the mechanism to "peek" into the SSL traffic? I would assume that some serious cost-based analysis would have to happen for most organizations.

So, I wonder about the possibility of a new SSL protocol, or something similar. I haven't done any research to see what options have been explored by those smarter than I, so there is a strong possibility that what I am thinking about has already been tried and found wanting. But, here's what I am thinking:

An SSL protocol that utilizes a "secondary transmission" protocol. I am basically proposing that in addition to the normal session initiation, traffic, and ending, that an additional packet be sent that contains the name of the authenticated user and the resource(s) that they are accessing/downloading/uploading/modifying, as well as containing the sequence number of the previous SSL packet, a time of conversation value, and a flag to indicate if an anomaly (such as the username changing mid-conversation).

The transmission of this secondary packet should be based upon some psuedo-random algorithm that makes it harder for a malicious actor to spoof. Additionally, there should be a number of these packets sent and the totality should be based upon an algorithm using information specific to the SSL session itself.

As for the destination of this secondary packet I haven't decided on what I think is best. I am leaning towards a UDP based protocol that sends to the either the same host participating in the SSL conversation or to the localhosts logging (such as 514 syslog on a *nix machine).

Like I stated earlier, this thought may have already been analyzed and found wanting, but I wonder if there isn't something more in general that we can do with SSL to allow for it maintain the privacy it affords (the legal concern), the protection it facilitates, and the durability it needs WHILE supporting a mechanism for auditing its validity.

I would be very interested...after I finish some other stuff in my project queue to attempt to put this into practice. But first, I will definitely spend some time researching what has already, if at all, been attempted.

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