[Cryptography] pedagogical sources for TLS

[Fredrik Strömberg]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 12:46 AM David Wong <davidwong.crypto at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> How should new graduates start research on crypto protocols?
>> RFC documents are very boring for new graduates or senior students.
>>
Reading RFC's builds character! If only I had had the luxury of
starting out with RFC 8446. /s

I jest, but reading RFC's is what I did. I read RFC 2246 over and
over, jumped to Wikipedia when I didn't understand something, and then
back again, until I understood all terminology and aspects of the
protocol. It was hard and I'm sure extremely inefficient, but it
worked for me.

On a more serious note, I second Kevin's recommendation of Security
Engineering by Ross Anderson.

For a quick and pedagogical intro I would go for Jeff Moser's article,
or the second link below:
http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
https://tlseminar.github.io/first-few-milliseconds/

Cheers,
Fredrik Strömberg
Mullvad VPN

>> Let's firstly aim to understand Signal protocol. There is a 10 page nice paper published by WhatsApp. Very good for beginners.
>> Next, lets aim to understand TLS. What is the easiest source? What is the most pedagogical document?
>>
>> The more general question is what is the learning pathway for new graduates to study on crypto protocols and their cryptanalysis.
>
>
>
> If I may, I published two resources that might be helpful:
>
> * https://davidwong.fr/tls13/ is a more readable version of the TLS specification (it's true that the format for RFCs is quite outdated), with some intro videos in major sections (although not all sections have videos, sorry about that...)
> * https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09 is a book I released a few months ago where I try to teach intuitions about cryptographic primitives (first part of the book) and protocols (second part of the book). In chapter 9 you can learn about TLS (and Noise), and in chapter 10 you can learn about Signal. I've done my best to explain these protocols in intuitive ways (and I created a lot of diagrams), so hopefully this is a helpful resource.
>
> Cheers,
> David
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