Securing Communications between Multiple Entities Using a Single TLS Session

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the de facto standard that provides end-to-end secure communications with mutual authentication between two communicating entities. TLS has been designed to run from end to end, in which case intermediate hosts are considered as man in the middle attacks. Recently, TLS is widely deployed by applications and networks to exchange keys between more than two entities, as it is the case of WLAN, SIP and Grid. However, TLS use is limited to authenticate the entities, in which case the TLS encryption and MAC keys are not used. Moreover, it is not possible to any third party to trace some transactions for security reasons. This article defines a set of RSA-based ciphersuites to enable TLS based-authentication and key exchange between more than two entities.