Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Practice Question

In a TLS 1.2 handshake that uses a static RSA key exchange, the client generates the premaster secret and encrypts it with the server's long-term public RSA key contained in the certificate. Anyone who later obtains the matching private key can decrypt that premaster secret from the captured ClientKeyExchange message, derive the master secret, and reconstruct the symmetric session keys-making full decryption of the recorded data possible. When the handshake uses ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (DHE or ECDHE), each session establishes a one-time key that is never encrypted with the server's long-term key, providing perfect forward secrecy (PFS) and preventing retrospective decryption. Certificate hash algorithms such as SHA-1 and the choice of bulk cipher (e.g., AES-256-GCM) do not affect whether the historic traffic can be decrypted once the private key is exposed.