Re: [Cfrg] AES GCM SIV analysis

[Brian Smith <[e-mail]>]

Adam Langley <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Brian Smith <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> The actual text in the draft is "Thus with AES-GCM-SIV we recommend
>> that, for a specific key, a nonce not be repeated more than 2^8
>> times."
>>
>> Is this a meaningful recommendation? How would one go about following
>> this recommendation in a practical implementation? In particular,
>> AES-GCM-SIV is mostly interesting in implementations that cannot
>> reliably and/or consistently save state, and it seems like any attempt
>> to write code to enforce this relies on saving state [snip]

> [snip] With a random, 96-bit nonce you don't have to worry
> about the probability of having repeated a single value > 2^8 times
> until you have a staggering number of plaintexts: greater than 2^100
> of them. Since that vastly exceeds our current recommendation for
> number of plaintexts per key (2^50), it's basically not a concern.
>
> If that makes sense, what could we have written to be clearer?

Perhaps: "We recommend instead that an implementation try to avoid
repeating a nonce for a specific key, just like it would it would do
for an AEAD that isn't nonce-misuse-resistant." This shifts the
emphasis away from the 2^8 number to where it belongs, IMO. Note that
"256" and how it is derived and why it is safe is explained in the
next paragraph anyway.

> I agree that large AEAD messages have several problems. But I don't
> think that we have any need for a larger nonce (see above). (And the
> nonce is used with a counter only in the KDF phase, so it's unrelated
> to the maximum plaintext size.)

Is there any way that a larger nonce (e.g. 120 bits) hurts, other than
being inconsistent with existing IETF AEADs?

Cheers,
Brian
-- 
https://briansmith.org/