Re: [Cfrg] Authenticated Encryption with AES-CBC and HMAC-SHA, version 01

["Dan Harkins" <[e-mail]>]

  Hi David,

On Mon, November 12, 2012 3:39 pm, David McGrew (mcgrew) wrote:
>
>
> On 11/12/12 3:21 PM, "Dan Harkins" <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>
>>  Hi Mike,
>>
>>> From: Mike Jones
>>> <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
>>> Date: Monday, November 12, 2012 1:55 PM
>>> To: Cisco Employee <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>,
>>> "[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>"
>>> <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>,
>>> "[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>"
>>> <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
>>> Subject: RE: [Cfrg] Authenticated Encryption with AES-CBC and HMAC-SHA,
>>> version 01
>>>
>>> As background, if there was a version of this spec that did not assume
>>> that the parameters would be concatenated together in a specific way,
>>>but
>>> left them as independent inputs and outputs, as AES GCM and AES CTR do,
>>>it
>>> would be a better match for JOSE¹s use case.
>>
>>  I encourage you to look into SIV mode, an AEAD scheme found in
>>RFC 5297. SIV was defined by Rogaway and Shrimpton (in a paper
>>found in the RFC) and is provably secure.
>>
>>  It takes a vector of input as additional authenticated data which will
>>be authenticated, and a plaintext which will be authenticated and
>>encrypted. It does not assume that the parameters are concatenated
>>together, it's just a vector of separate inputs.
>>
>>  Additionally, SIV mode does not require a random IV/nonce. It works
>>just fine if you have one, and it won't collapse if it is repeated (as
>> GCM
>>does) or is predictable (as CBC-HMAC does), and it works if you don't
>>have, or want to have, one. In that fashion it is more robust than other
>>AEAD schemes. The downside is that it's slower than GCM but is probably
>>faster than CBC-HMAC with SHA2.
>
> AES-SIV is in several ways technically superior to AES-CBC-HMAC-SHA.
> However, the motivation to use the latter algorithm is its widespread
> availability, as I understand it.   Mike and some other folks did a survey
> of what crypto that is available.  (Perhaps someone can send a reference,
> it is a good survey.)

  Well, there is no widespread availability of AES-CBC-HMAC-SHA either.
There may be availability of AES-CBC and HMAC-SHA separately but then
there is, probably, availability of AES-CTR and AES-CMAC too and that
is all SIV is, a provably secure construction of those two primitives.

> Despite SIV's flexibility, it doesn't address Mike's complaint, because it
> does not have an authentication tag that is separate from the ciphertext.
>  Instead, it has the synthetic IV (which acts like an auth tag) combined
> with the ciphertext.

  Ahh, I missed that. But I think that is probably a trivial complaint of
any 5116 AEAD scheme. It should be straightforward to extract the
specific sub-string from the bitstring returned by any of the appropriate
schemes if he wants to copy the IV/MAC/tag/whatever into a field that
is separate from the encrypted plaintext.

> As an aside, if SIV is used for JOSE, it can use the RFC 5116 interface
> (see Sections 6.1-6.3 of the SIV RFC) and essentially would need to do so.

  Good point!

  Regards,

  Dan.

> David
>
>>
>>  regards,
>>
>>  Dan.
>>
>>
>>
>
>