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Internet Engineering Task Force Releases the Final Version of TLS 1.3; Newest Chrome and Firefox Versions Already Support a Draft Version of It (cnet.com)
The encryption that protects your browser's connection to websites is getting a notch faster and a notch safer to use. From a report: That's because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on Friday finished a years-long process of modernizing the technology used to secure website communications. You may never have heard of Transport Layer Security -- TLS for short -- but version 1.3 is now complete and headed to websites, browsers and other parts of the internet that rely on its security. "Publishing TLS 1.3 is a huge accomplishment. It is one the best recent examples of how it is possible to take 20 years of deployed legacy code and change it on the fly, resulting in a better internet for everyone," said Nick Sullivan, head of cryptography for Cloudflare, which helps customers distribute their websites and other content around the world, in a blog post.
TLS 1.3 brings some significant improvements over TLS 1.2, which was finished 10 years ago. Perhaps first on the list is that it'll mean websites load faster. Setting up an encrypted connection on the web historically has caused delays since your browser and the website server must send information back and forth in a process called a handshake. The slower your broadband or the more congested your mobile network is, the more you'll notice these delays. Firefox and Chrome already support a draft version of TLS 1.3.
TLS 1.3 brings some significant improvements over TLS 1.2, which was finished 10 years ago. Perhaps first on the list is that it'll mean websites load faster. Setting up an encrypted connection on the web historically has caused delays since your browser and the website server must send information back and forth in a process called a handshake. The slower your broadband or the more congested your mobile network is, the more you'll notice these delays. Firefox and Chrome already support a draft version of TLS 1.3.
Be very wary of Cloudflare. This company wants all of your DNS traffic, had Mozilla build it into their web browser under the guise of DNS privacy, now we have TLS 1.3, which they have been pushing hard. There is something in TLS 1.3 that benefits Cloudflare and it will be a matter of time before we know. This increased speed they claim is relative, the "less hacks" from older ciphers is easily dealt with, but the finger print that is in the messages is alarming.
Spend any time browsing TLS mailing lists and you'll find an alarming lack of individuals with proper background to evaluate the protocol. It's more likely NSA felt wasting resources on intentional subversion was unnecessary and redundant.
That was certainly the case with 1.3. It's not that there weren't good crypotographers involved, but you need to look at the way the protocol was designed. It has every feature that every person on the mailing list who works for a large Internet company (so Google, Facebook, Akamai, Cloudflare, and a few others) could think of in it, and then some more stuff added by other players where no-one was interested enough to challenge the addition. The crypto parts may be OK, but the whole protocol is such a monstrous destructively-interacting clusterfuck of every feature that Google wanted for its use, every feature that Facebook wanted for its use, every feature that Akamai wanted for its use, and more, that it's going to be years, if ever, before all the problems get sorted out.
The OP mentions "20 years of deployed legacy code", that's 20 years of code that's been tuned and fixed up to address issues, not 20 year-old abandonware. TLS 1.3 resets the counter to 0-day, everyone needs to start again from scratch to play catch-up with all the problems that are hiding in there.
So yes, the NSA didn't need to do anything to fsck things up, the design process has already taken care of that.