Fast-Track Session Establishment for TLS

We propose a new, “fast-track” handshake mechanism for TLS. A fast-track client caches a server’s public parameters and negotiated parameters in the course of an initial, enabling handshake. These parameters need not be resent on subsequent handshakes. The new mechanism reduces both network traffic and the number of round trips, and requires no additional server state. These savings are most useful in high latency environments such as wireless networks. We include a rollback mechanism to allow a server to gracefully revert to an ordinary TLS handshake when needed. Our design is fully backwards compatible: fast-track clients can interoperate with servers unaware of fast-track and vise versa. We have implemented our proposal to demonstrate the savings in network traffic and round trips.