A survey and analysis of TLS interception mechanisms and motivations
Xavier de Carn\'e de Carnavalet, Paul C. van Oorschot

TL;DR
This paper surveys and analyzes various TLS interception mechanisms, exploring their use cases, motivations, security implications, and stakeholder incentives, providing a comprehensive overview of how TLS is bypassed and extended in practice.
Contribution
It offers a systematic review of 30 TLS interception schemes, evaluates their security and deployability, and discusses stakeholder incentives, filling a gap in understanding TLS interception techniques.
Findings
Many schemes compromise end-to-end security
Stakeholder incentives influence scheme adoption
Compatibility varies across different interception methods
Abstract
TLS is an end-to-end protocol designed to provide confidentiality and integrity guarantees that improve end-user security and privacy. While TLS helps defend against pervasive surveillance of intercepted unencrypted traffic, it also hinders several common beneficial operations typically performed by middleboxes on the network traffic. Consequently, various methods have been proposed that "bypass" the confidentiality goals of TLS by playing with keys and certificates essentially in a man-in-the-middle solution, as well as new proposals that extend the protocol to accommodate third parties, delegation schemes to trusted middleboxes, and fine-grained control and verification mechanisms. We first review the use cases expecting plain HTTP traffic and discuss the extent to which TLS hinders these operations. We retain 19 scenarios where access to unencrypted traffic is still relevant and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMobile Agent-Based Network Management · Energy Harvesting in Wireless Networks · Satellite Communication Systems
