PG: TLS-Attacker and the TLS ecosystem

The goal of this project is to evaluate new concepts and methods for the analysis of the TLS ecosystem.

The project shall be built on top of our TLS-Attacker. TLS-Attacker (and TLS-Scanner) allow you to easily evaluate the properties of any TLS server. Based on the results, you can learn a lot about the implementation properties, server configuration, and specific bugs. While the server evaluation is quite nice, we would like to go further and build a database to understand the TLS ecosystem. For this purpose, frequent scans of high-profile servers should be performed and evaluated using modern machine learning methods or cool statistic techniques. On the end, maybe we can fingerprint TLS implementations or predict next TLS server behaviors.

While having some background on TLS and security would be nice (e.g., by visiting our RWC lecture), it is not necessary. For the project group we are searching different candidates bringing different perspectives to the team, for example:

  • crypto
  • networks / scanning
  • web development
  • statistics
  • machine learning

We select our participants through personal interviews. The interviews will take place from September 21 - September 29. To get a time slot, please contact Carmen Buschmeyer (carmen@upb.de) via email no later than September 18, with an indication of your free time slots. We will inform you about the format of the interview (online or in-person). But do not forget to submit the assignment in jupyter.

For more information about the project, see also our project presentation.

There will also be a seminar on System Security, where scanning relevant topics will be handled.