The Order of Encryption and Authentication for Protecting Communications (or: How Secure Is SSL?)

We study the question of how to generically compose symmetric encryption and authentication when building "secure channels" for the protection of communications over insecure networks. We show that any secure channels protocol designed to work with any combination of secure encryption (against chosen plaintext attacks) and secure MAC must use the encrypt-then-authenticate method. We demonstrate this by showing that the other common methods of composing encryption and authentication, including the authenticate-then-encrypt method used in SSL, are not generically secure. We show an example of an encryption function that provides (Shannon's) perfect secrecy but when combined with any MAC function under the authenticate-then-encrypt method yields a totally insecure protocol (for example, finding passwords or credit card numbers transmitted under the protection of such protocol becomes an easy task for an active attacker). The same applies to the encrypt-and-authenticate method used in SSH. On the positive side we show that the authenticate-then-encrypt method is secure if the encryption method in use is either CBC mode (with an underlying secure block cipher) or a stream cipher (that xor the data with a random or pseudorandom pad). Thus, while we show the generic security of SSL to be broken, the current practical implementations of the protocol that use the above modes of encryption are safe.