On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 1:48 PM David Benjamin <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 4:41 PM Eric Rescorla <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 1:34 PM Jan Schaumann <jschauma=
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Eric Rescorla <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> > If you have access to the traffic keys you certainly can mount
>>> > a MITM attack, but you can also just take over the connection
>>> > and impersonate the server entirely
>>>
>>> How does an adversary only able to compromise the
>>> key-exchange for a specific session impersonate the
>>> server for any traffic outside of this session?
>>>
>>
>> It doesn't. Sorry, what I meant was that there's no need to
>> send traffic to the server at all once you compute the traffic
>> keys. In other words, you act as an endpoint rather than
>> being "in the middle".
>>
>
> It does extend a little beyond the connection. The attacker has learned
> every secret established during the handshake. Not only can they
> impersonate the server over this connection, they also know the resumption
> secrets for all issued tickets and can impersonate the server when that
> client reconnects with the ticket. They can also keep on issuing more
> tickets over any of these connections and try to extend their attack on
> this client. (Also an attacker with a CRQC that can break one instance of
> some classical algorithm presumably can run the attack again on other
> instances.)
>
> They also know the exporter secret, which the application may be depending
> on for whatever.
>

I agree with these statements. Jan used the word "session" which I decided
to read them in informally, even though it's not really as much of a
concept in TLS 1.3, but it's good to be precise.

While we're on the topic, it *also* lets them collect things like cookies
and passwords, which would also allow client impersonation in many cases.

-Ekr


>
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