Decrypt Perfect Forward Secrecy with F5 BIG-IP and ExtraHop
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November 15, 2018
Decrypt Perfect Forward Secrecy with F5 BIG-IP and ExtraHop
How F5 and ExtraHop work together for passive visibility
Earlier this year, the IETF finalized the TLS 1.3 specification which introduces performance enhancements as well as mandates perfect forward secrecy (PFS). This came as an unpleasant surprise to many enterprise IT organizations who need to passively decrypt and analyze network traffic for a variety of reasons, but they were too late to the party to change things.
ExtraHop's customers had already asked us to develop a solution for passively decrypting PFS traffic that wouldn't require an expensive man-in-the-middle appliance. That solution involves deploying a session key forwarding agent (we like to call it a "secret agent") on the customer-controlled servers that you want to analyze traffic to and from. An alternative is to use an F5 BIG-IP application delivery controller to extract those session keys and then forward them to the ExtraHop appliance.
Our friends at F5's DevCentral put together a lightboard video and blog post detailing how to implement this solution. Give it a watch!
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Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Tyson helps to educate the IT Operations Management community about what is possible with real-time analysis of wire data. Prior to ExtraHop, Tyson worked as a technical marketing writer for Microsoft, Seagate, and the Association of Computing Machinery, where he wrote for and edited the TechNews e-mail newsletter from 2000 to 2005. You can find him on Twitter under @tsupasat.