Retour 
TLS is the most important protocol for secure communication with web sites and cloud services. Any vendor with ambitions in the SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) market has to be able to proxy TLS at scale. That requires considerable sophistication in terms of designing the computing and networking infrastructure for a SASE “security cloud,” but it also requires attention to the details of TLS itself.
TLS 1.3 is the current state-of-the-art version of TLS, and was finalized more than two years ago. Since TLS 1.3 has some important merits, and has been stable for a while, it’s not surprising that a number of security vendors support it. What’s a little more surprising is how squishy the concept of “support” turns out to be. So this article is a short guide about the places TLS 1.3 might show up in a SASE or would-be SASE system, the ways it might be “supported,” and why these details are important for enterprise security.
Does TLS 1.3 matter?
Let’s acknowledge immediately that most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about TLS 1.3, and likely don’t have strong feelings on the subject. So a fair question is, “does the protocol really matter?” TLS 1.3 makes a meaningful difference to security, and it’s in use at a meaningful fraction of web sites, so there’s a solid argument that it really does matter.
Although the changes from TLS 1.2 are relatively small, those changes are important to eliminate or reduce a number of recent high-profile attacks. A number of other blogs have summarized the security and performance changes in TLS 1.3. Eliminating even one serious attack is an important gain, and TLS 1.3 does far more than that.
When you look at the statistics collected by SSL Labs, it turns out that TLS 1.3 is already the best available SSL/TLS version on 25% of the Alexa 150K (the most popular web sites in the world). So we can comfortably say that it’s widely used.
So TLS 1.3 does really matter. Where should we be looking for it in a SASE system?
Where does TLS 1.3 show up?
In SASE or aspiring-SASE products, there are basically three places where it’s sensible to be paying attention to TLS 1.3 support: proxy, tunnel, and management.
The first, and by far the most important location, is in the TLS proxy functionality. A trusted security proxy effectively splices itself into the TLS conversation between client and server, so it can inspect traffic that is otherwise encrypted. TLS 1.3 support in a trusted security proxy is crucial because otherwise the use of the proxy itself actually degrades security: a client/server conversation that coul