What is TSP? How does TSP work?

In our last article, we explored the fundamentals of TBU (or Tachyon Booster UDP). TBU is the core of Tachyon’s architecture which will replace the Application, Transport and Internet layers of the conventional TCP/IP protocol.

Today we will take a look at TSP, or Tachyon Security Protocol. As the name suggests, TSP is that part of Tachyon which ensures that the ecosystem remains safe from hackers and user data remains hidden from the outside world. The two main weapons in TSP’s arsenal are Asymmetric end-to-end Encryption and Protocol Simulation Scheme.

ECDHE-ECDSA Asymmetric end-to-end Encryption

The data that you send over the Internet passes through a host of servers, routers, and devices. There’s simply no way of knowing how secure any of these data gateways are. For all you know, your data might be intercepted by hackers at multiple points.

The most reliable safeguard against this problem is end-to-end encryption, which scrambles user data such that only the recipient can make any sense out of it. Even if a hacker intercepts this data, it would seem all gibberish. It’s only when the data reaches its correct destination that it is unscrambled and the original message is revealed.

Let’s say at a birthday party, Jim wants to send a secret message to his friend Rob; but the party is teeming with other kids, and he can’t risk the secret being let out. Luckily for Jim, both he and Rob have been taking French classes outside their school hours. Jim jots down the message in French on a piece of paper, and asks the other kids to relay it over to Rob. Now even if any of his friends open the chit, he won’t be able to make any meaning out of it. Smart move, Jim!

Ordinary point-to-point networking suffers from 2 major threats:

1.Network Sniffing

Hackers can use Network Sniffing tools to intercept and analyze the data flowing over computer network links. Most of these Sniffers work mainly with TCP/IP packets, but more sophisticated tools can work lower in the network hierarchy and even intercept Ethernet frames.

To counter such data hacking techniques, TSP creates encryption keys in insecure channels (where data points are unfamiliar with the credentials of each other) by implementing ECDH — ECDSA and Ephemeral Key. ECDH — ECDSA are a class of cryptographic algorithms which come under what is known as Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

TSP also uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to ensure that even if the message is intercepted, the attacker wouldn’t be able to read it. In addition to this, a set of hash algorithms, such as HMAC, SHA2 and Keccak, are deployed so that in case the attacker is able to alter the data, the message would be automatically ignored.

In some instances, although the attacker is unable to decode the message, he might still be able to acquire some statistical feature information from it. TSP safeguards against this through a combination of different techniques, such as using a public symmetric encryption key, adding random data to the transmitted message, and encrypting the information part (such as the frame byte of the data packet).

Moreover, the likelihood of an encryption key being deciphered increases with multiple usages. TSP avoids any such risks by automatically renegotiating the encryption key after the connection transmits a certain length of data.

2. Man-in-the-middle Attack (MITM)

In MITM, the attacker actually pretends to be one of the communicating parties and intercepts the communication. In 2018, well known hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger became the victim of MITM attacks. A piece of malware that made its way into the user’s computer would simply modify the “Bitcoin receive address” as displayed on the Ledger Wallet app. The satoshis that were supposed to make their way to the user’s wallet ended up being directed to the attacker’s public address instead.

TSP protects against MITM attacks by using ECDH (or Elliptic-Curve Diffie–Hellman), a key agreement protocol that allows two parties to establish a shared secret communication over an insecure channel. This makes it possible for the identities of both parties to be verified before any data is transmitted. Through ECDH, each of these parties generates an elliptic-curve public-private key pair. As long as this private key is not exposed, MITM attacks can be prevented.

Protocol Simulation Scheme

A distinct feature of TSP is the Protocol Simulation Scheme, which allows Tachyon to simulate well known communication protocols, such as UDP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and SMTP. So while Tachyon encrypts data packets using its own TBU protocol stack (discussed in our last article), anyone who intercepts this data would assume that the data belongs to the communication protocol being simulated.

Though Protocol Simulation, TSP guarantees that the real content of the communication is concealed, in order to avoid information unwarranted interception and exposure. It also fools firewalls and other third party applications into letting Tachyon data flow unhindered — a feature that is really useful in Tachyon’s VPN application.

Today, HTTP/HTTPS is the most commonly used communication protocol in the World Wide Web. However, in most cases, the data that is transmitted is completely unencrypted, which makes it vulnerable to hacking. Moreover, HTTP-based communication checks neither the identity of the node with which communicating is being established, nor the integrity of the message being transmitted.

In case of Tachyon, not only is the data encrypted in multiple levels, but the nature of the data packet is concealed as well. For example, in case of SMTP simulation, the data will resemble an ordinary e-mail; while in case of HTTPS simulation, the data traffic will appear like the user is visiting a website such as Google or BBC News.

So now you have a basic understanding of 2 of the 3 pillars of Tachyon’s architecture, TBU and TSP. For more details, do check out our whitepaper. And keep following our Medium account for more such insights into Tachyon Protocol.