ImperialViolet

AEADs combine encryption and authentication in a way that provides the properties that people generally expect when they “encrypt” something. This is great because, historically, handing people a block cipher and a hash function has resulted in a lot of bad and broken constructions. Standardising AEADs avoids this.

Common AEADs have a sharp edge though: you must never encrypt two different messages with the same key and nonce. Doing so generally violates the confidentiality of the two messages and might break much more.

There are some situations where obtaining a unique nonce is easy, for example in transport security where a simple counter can be used. (Due to poor design in TLS 1.2, some TLS implementations still managed to duplicate nonces. The answer there is to do what ChaCha20-Poly1305 does in TLS 1.2, and what everything does in TLS 1.3: make the nonce implicit. That means that any mistakes result in your code not interoperating, which should be noticed.)

But there are situations where ensuring nonce uniqueness is not trivial, generally where multiple machines are independently encrypting with the same key. A system for distributing nonces is complex and hard to have confidence in. Generating nonces randomly and depending on statistical uniqueness is reasonable, but only if the space of nonces is large enough. XSalsa20-Poly1305 (paper, code) has a 192-bit nonce and good performance across a range of CPUs. In many situations, using that with random nonces is a sound choice.

However, lots of chips now have hardware support for the AES-GCM AEAD, meaning that its performance and power use is hard to beat. Also, a 192-bit nonce results in a ~40% increase in overhead vs the 96-bit nonce of AES-GCM, which is undesirable in some contexts. (Overhead consists of the nonce and tag, thus the increase from 96- to 192-bit nonces is not 100%.)

But using random nonces in a 96-bit space isn't that comfortable. NIST recommends a limit of 2³² messages when using random nonces with AES-GCM which, while quite large, is often not large enough not to have to worry about. Because of this, Shay Gueron, Yehuda Lindell and I have been working on AES-GCM-SIV (paper, spec): AES-GCM with some forgiveness. It uses the same primitives as AES-GCM, and thus enjoys the same hardware support, but it doesn't fail catastrophically if you repeat a nonce. Thus you can use random, 96-bit nonces with a far larger number of messages, or withstand a glitch in your nonce distribution scheme. (For precise numbers, see section 5.3 of the paper.)

There is a performance cost: AES-GCM-SIV encryption runs at about 70% the speed of AES-GCM, although decryption runs at the same speed. (Measured using current BoringSSL on an Intel Skylake chip with 8KiB messages.) But, in any situation where you don't have a watertight argument for nonce uniqueness, that might be pretty cheap compared to the alternative.

For example, both TLS and QUIC need to encrypt small messages at the server that can be decrypted by other servers. For TLS, these messages are the session tickets and, in QUIC, they are the source-address tokens. This is an example of a situation where many servers are independently encrypting with the same key and so Google's QUIC implementation is in the process of switching to using AES-GCM-SIV for source-address tokens. (Our TLS implementation may switch too in the future, although that will be more difficult because of existing APIs.)

AEADs that can withstand nonce duplication are called “nonce-misuse resistant” and that name appears to have caused some people to believe that they are infinitely resistant. I.e. that an unlimited number of messages can be encrypted with a fixed nonce with no loss in security. That is not the case, and the term wasn't defined that way originally by Rogaway and Shrimpton (nor does their SIV mode have that property). So it's important to emphasise that AES-GCM-SIV (and nonce-misuse resistant modes in general) are not a magic invulnerability shield. Figure four and section five of the the paper give precise bounds but, if in doubt, consider AES-GCM-SIV to be a safety net for accidental nonce duplication and otherwise treat it like a traditional AEAD.

AES-GCM-SIV is supported in BoringSSL now and, while one may not want to use the whole of BoringSSL, the core assembly is ISC licensed. Also, Shay has published reference, assembly and intrinsics versions for those who think AES-GCM-SIV might be useful to them.