Forward Secrecy SSL Guide | Deploying Forward Secrecy in TLS | Qualys
Summary: This Qualys post explains that the RSA key exchange used in most SSL/TLS handshakes lets anyone holding a copy of the server's private key recover the session keys and decrypt past conversations. It describes forward secrecy, achieved with ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (DHE or ECDHE), as generating session keys that only the two communicating parties can obtain, even if the server's private key is later compromised.
What's compelling: An adversary who cannot get your private key today can still record your encrypted traffic and decrypt it later once they obtain the key by bribery, warrant, or future computing advances - and with forward secrecy they would have to break the session keys of every individual conversation instead of one server key.
Read the original at Qualys Blog ↗
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- Endpoint & Network Security
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