PKI Consortium blog

TLS 1.3 Includes Improvements to Security and Performance
April 10, 2018 by Tim Shirley Forward Secrecy IETF SSL/TLS TLS 1.2 TLS 1.3 Vulnerability

Last month saw the final adoption, after 4 years of work, of TLS version 1.3 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This latest iteration of the protocol for secure communications on the internet boasts several noteworthy improvements to both security and performance:

Security

All cipher suites that do not provide forward secrecy have been eliminated from TLS 1.3. This is a very important security property, because without forward secrecy, if a server’s private key is compromised today, any previously-recorded conversations with that server dating back as long as the key was in use could be decrypted. While it is possible (and highly recommended) to configure a server with TLS 1.2 to prefer (or only support) cipher suites that provide forward secrecy, under TLS 1.3 these are the only option. Other cryptographic modernizations in TLS 1.3 include the elimination of DSA, custom DHE groups, and compression.