Correctly Implementing Forward Secrecy

Forward Secrecy further protects the confidentiality and integrity of the information transmitted during a TLS connection and encrypts TLS connections to a website or service.Forward Secrecy offers substantial privacy and confidentiality benefits for encrypted channels accessing the Internet. Unfortunately, its benefits are often times not fully realized due to configuration errors, misconfiguring services that negatively affect the effectiveness of Forward Secrecy, or avoiding the use of it because of a requirement to support legacy systems that do not have the ability to utilize it. To address these issues, this paper will describe how users can implement Forward Secrecy to its full benefits.HTTPS traffic can contain some of the most sensitive information belonging to individuals and businesses such as SSNs, account numbers, balances and user names or passwords. However, it may also contain less sensitive information, but information that one would expect to be protected from any unauthorized viewing or collection. Without correct implementation, the goal of Forward Secrecy can never be achieved and any data, whether sensitive or not, could have its privacy compromised.