Re: [Cfrg] I-D Action: draft-irtf-cfrg-gcmsiv-03.txt

[Shay Gueron <[e-mail]>]

Dear John,

The bounds in the reference that I pointed to (re. the KDF) bound with the
max between the quadratic and linear term (and 1).

I agree with your comment about q=3. If a usage is supposed to send q=3
messages (i.e., q=3 different nonces) with one key, it makes no point to
have a KDF before GCM-SIV (regardless of its design). Better use GCM-SIV
directly (the one described in the CCS15 paper).

In fact, even for a usage that has only very short messages (e.g., key
wrapping), GCM-SIV can be used directly (no KDF) and with a fixed nonce.

However, AES-GCM-SIV is constructed by a KDF step before the GCM-SIV
processing, with the intention to extend the lifetime of a given key,
beyond 2^{32}, (as it is with GCM-SIV, as explained in the text). In such
cases, it is useful to have a KDF with a small bound on the distinguishing
advantage. We chose the one that is described in the spec.

Thanks, Shay


2017-01-19 0:22 GMT-08:00 John Mattsson <[e-mail]>:

> Thanks Shay,
>
> See reply inline.
>
> Cheers,
> John
>
>
> From: Shay Gueron <[e-mail]>
> Date: Thursday, 19 January 2017 at 02:05
> To: Adam Langley <[e-mail]>
> Cc: John Mattsson2 <[e-mail]>, "[e-mail]" <
> [e-mail]>, Shay Gueron <[e-mail]>
> Subject: Re: [Cfrg] I-D Action: draft-irtf-cfrg-gcmsiv-03.txt
>
> Hello everyone,
>
>
> I will try to address, really briefly, two of the points raised here and
> deferred to me.
>
> The definition of POLYVAL: there is an inherent discrepancy in the
> definition of AES-GCM. 128-bit blocks need to be viewed as polynomials, and
> also as 16 bytes for input/output for AES (AES is defined over bytes). The
> way that the polynomials are defined leads to bytes that have the reverse
> order of bits, compared to how AES views a bytes. I will publish a
>  detailed paper on this issue. For now, there is some explanation in my
> talk at RWC 2011 [1].
> POLYVAL is defined in a way that is consistent with AES.
>
>
> The other topic is why truncate the AES (throw away half of the bits) when
> generating per-nonce keys. The idea is to get indistinguishabilityle bounds
> that do not have a term that is quadratic in the number of queries (like
> the ones we would get if we used all of the bits). Roughly speaking the
> truncation gets us a term that looks like q/2^(96) instead of q^2/2^{129}.
> The bounds and discussion can be seen at  [2].
>
>
> Asymptotically yes, but in this case we have q=2 and q=3 and any
> disadvantage of using a PRP should be negligible.
> In fact, if the above terms were true for small q (which they are likely
> not) the the then quadratic term is preferable as  2^2/2^{129} = 1/2^{127}
> << 2/2^{96} = 1/2^{95}
> Feels like doubling the amount of AES operations may be overkill and not
> worth the negligible security increase. GCM is popular for its performance,
> not for high security bounds.
>
>
>
> Anyway an organized paper with a statement on the security bounds, is
> going to come out in a paper that we are working on these very days. We
> will post it soon.
>
> Thank you, Shay
>
> [1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/RealWorldCrypto/slides/gueron.pdf
>
> [2] S. Gilboa, S. Gueron, “The Advantage of Truncated Permutations”,
> https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02518   (submitted on 8 Oct 2016).
>
> 2017-01-18 16:13 GMT-08:00 Adam Langley <[e-mail]>:
>
>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 1:05 PM, John Mattsson
>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> > - In addition to listing the performance penalty compared to GCM. The
>> >   draft should also mention that compared to GCM, some nice properties
>> >   disappear:
>> >   - Neither Encryption nor Decryption is online as encryption/decryption
>> >     cannot start before the whole plaintext/ciphertext is known.
>>
>> I agree that this is true for encryption, but I don't believe that
>> AES-GCM should be *de*crypted in a streaming fashion, but rather that
>> records should be sized so that this isn't a problem. (At which point
>> the benefit for streaming encryption becomes small or moot.)
>>
>> I've a long spiel about the dangers of processing unauthenticated
>> ciphertext which I'll spare you :) But, even for small machines, the
>> memory needed to safely buffer the decrypted plaintext to avoid
>> releasing it before it's authenticated is equal to the memory to
>> buffer the ciphertext followed by decrypting in-place.
>>
>> So I actually quite like that the tag is at the end of the message
>> with AES-GCM-SIV because it makes it harder to do what I think is the
>> "wrong" thing.
>>
>> >   - GCM-SIV removes the possibility to preprocess static headers (AAD).
>>
>> Indeed.
>>
>> (I wasn't sure where to put these points in the spec so, for the
>> moment, I've added an appendix for "Additional comparisons with
>> AES-GCM". I'm collecting changes in GitHub before making a new
>> version. For this message, see
>> https://github.com/agl/gcmsiv/commit/c6c7fd388dd122251264222
>> b7491c6212e818319.)
>>
>> > - “The result of the encryption is the resulting ciphertext (truncated
>> >    to the length of the plaintext) followed by the tag."
>> >
>> >   I suggest that the tag is placed first instead of last in the
>> >   ciphertext. This makes decryption online, which makes a large
>> >   difference. Suggestion:
>> >
>> >   “The result of the encryption is the tag followed by the ciphertext
>> >    (truncated to the length of the plaintext)"
>>
>> (See above.)
>>
>> >
>> >
>> > - "within 5% of the speed of AES-GCM."
>> >   Should state when this is the case, e.g. long plaintext/aad.
>>
>> Done.
>>
>> >
>> > - I think the draft should give performance data also for short
>> >   plaintexts/aad or even better list the performance in number of
>> >   operations:
>> >
>> >   GCM:
>> >     Block Cipher Operations = p + 1
>> >     GF(2^128) Multiplications = p + a + 1
>> >
>> >   GCM-SIV-128
>> >     Block Cipher Operations = p + 5
>> >     GF(2^128) Multiplications = p + a + 1
>> >
>> >   GCM-SIV-256
>> >     Block Cipher Operations = p + 7
>> >     GF(2^128) Multiplications = p + a + 1
>> >
>> >   (if I got it right...)
>>
>> I think that's correct and I've added that to the new appendix.
>>
>> >   Where p is the block length of the plaintext and a is the block length
>> >   of the additional authenticated data,
>> >
>> >   I doubt that encryption of short messages are anywhere near 5% of GCM.
>> >
>> > - The "++" and "[:8]" operation should probably be defined.
>>
>> Done.
>>
>> >
>> > - What it the security/performance tradeoff with truncation in the key
>> >   derivation? What would the security properties be if "[:8]" was
>> >   removed?
>>
>> I'll have to let Shay answer this, but the rough idea is that, since
>> AES is a permutation, not two ciphertexts can be equal given that
>> we're encrypting different plaintexts using the KDF phase. However,
>> ideally we would want a PRF where outputs can be the same. By taking
>> only the first eight bytes of each ciphertext block, we better
>> approximate a PRF.
>>
>> > - The definition of U32LE seems unnecessary and only adds complexity.
>> >   I suggest:
>> >     OLD "U32LE(3) ++ nonce"
>> >     NEW "03 ++ 000000 ++ nonce
>>
>> Good point.
>>
>> >
>> > - The term K1 is only used in Test Vectors. I guess it is an old term
>> >   that should be removed.
>>
>> Done.
>>
>> > Some editorials:
>>
>> Thank you for all these. They should be taken care of.
>>
>> > - OLD "The record-authentication key is 128-bit and the
>> >        record-authentication key"
>> >   NEW "The record-authentication key is 128-bit and the
>> >        record-encryption key"
>> >
>> > - "} else if bytelen(key-generating-key) == 32 {
>> >      record-encryption-key = AES128(key = key-generating-key,"
>> >
>> >   Should be AES256
>>
>> Indeed, and record-authentication-key is wrong too!
>>
>> > - Spacing around "+" and "*" are not consistent.
>> >
>> > - "the the"
>> >
>> > - yeilds
>> >
>> > - remainding
>> >
>> > - RFC7322 says "A comma is used before the last item of a series"
>>
>> I think I've leave this one to the RFC Editor!
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> AGL
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Cfrg mailing list
>> [e-mail]
>> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/cfrg
>>
>
>