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Announcing Keyless SSL

blog.cloudflare.com

11–20 of 190 posts

Re: Announcing Keyless SSL

#11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thought here. And what if that connection breaks? Another single point of failure?

Multiple connections between CloudFlare and the Keyless SSL Server running at the customer site. Connections are reused, pipelined, load balanced etc.

Interesting. Multiple connections AND multiple servers?

Re: Announcing Keyless SSL

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple connections between CloudFlare and the Keyless SSL Server running at the customer site. Connections are reused, pipelined, load balanced etc.

Interesting. Multiple connections AND multiple servers?

Yes.

Re: Announcing Keyless SSL

#13
post #2

So the communication between Cloudflare and the actual SSL key holder is secured by… what? Another key? In that case, any compromise of Cloudflare’s key is the same as a compromise of the original SSL key (at least in the short term).

The communication between CloudFlare and the Keyless SSL Server at the customer site is mutually authenticated TLS 1.2 with a specific set of cipher suites.

Re: Announcing Keyless SSL

#15
post #7

isn't this completely missing the point, i.e. banks being able to say 'no third parties can see our clients identifying information/balances/etc?' yes, the SSL key doesn't leave the bank, but everything it is protecting is..

Banks will typically do what the regulations require and then, what the cost of doing it is. Sometimes, that order flips ;)

Re: Announcing Keyless SSL

#17
post #4

After reading the beginning of the piece, I was expected something more...profound. Some deep mathematical breakthrough or something. Instead they separate the actual key signing, delegating it to the customer's device. That's nice and useful, but isn't quite what I was expecting.

Indeed; what they are doing seems to be pretty much the same thing as any (RSA) hardware crypto device. Except that it's over the Internet instead.

Re: Announcing Keyless SSL

#19
post #7

isn't this completely missing the point, i.e. banks being able to say 'no third parties can see our clients identifying information/balances/etc?' yes, the SSL key doesn't leave the bank, but everything it is protecting is..

It only protects one thing - server identity. The best ciphers do you use DHE for negotiating the key, so the conversation between bank and the client is secure anyway.
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