Augmented Secure Channels and the Goal of the TLS 1.3 Record Layer

Motivated by the wide adoption of authenticated encryption and TLS, we suggest a basic channel abstraction, an augmented secure channel (ASC), that allows a sender to send a receiver messages consisting of two parts, where one is privacy-protected and both are authenticity-protected. Working in the tradition of constructive cryptography, we formalize this idea and provide a construction of this kind of channel using the lower-level tool authenticated-encryption. We look at recent proposals on TLS 1.3 and suggest that the criterion by which their security can be judged is quite simple: do they construct an ASC? Due to this precisely defined goal, we are able to give a natural construction that comes with a rigorous security proof and directly leads to a proposal on TLS 1.3 that, in addition to being provably secure, is more efficient than existing ones.