mdTLS: How to Make Middlebox-Aware TLS More Efficient?

Recently, many organizations have been installing middleboxes in their networks in large numbers to provide various services to their customers. Although middleboxes have the advantage of not being dependent on specific hardware and being able to provide a variety of services, they can become a new attack target for hackers. Therefore, many researchers have proposed security-enchanced TLS protocols, but their results have some limitations. In this paper, we proposed a middlebox-delegated TLS (mdTLS) protocol that not only achieves the same security level but also requires relatively less computation compared to recent research results. mdTLS is a TLS protocol designed based on the proxy signature scheme, which requires about 39% less computation than middlebox-aware TLS (maTLS), which is the best in security and performance among existing research results. In order to substantiate the enhanced security of mdTLS, we conducted a formal verification using the Tamarin. Our verification demonstrates that mdTLS not only satisfies the security properties set forth by maTLS but also complies with the essential security properties required for proxy signature scheme (All of the formal models and lemmas are open to the public through the following url https://github.com/HackProof/mdTLS).