On Saturday 20 Apr 2013 17:02:29 Ximin Luo wrote:
> On 18/04/13 13:08, Matthew Toseland wrote:
> > On Thursday 18 Apr 2013 07:34:28 Florent Daigniere wrote:
> >> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 11:59:16PM +0100, Ximin Luo wrote:
> >>> OCB mode[1] is a CCA-secure[2] mode of encryption which means that it's 
> >>> secure against active attackers, which pretty much applies to anything on 
> >>> the internet. By contrast, non-authenticated encryption (anything without 
> >>> a MAC, e.g. AES-CBC, AES-CTR) is only CPA-secure[3] and breaks under an 
> >>> active attacker.
> >>>
> >>> You can build CCA-secure schemes by combining Enc() and Mac() operations 
> >>> (with different keys!). Enc(M)||Mac(Enc(M)) is generally secure; 
> >>> Enc(M||Mac(M)) and Enc(M)||Mac(M) can have security problems, the latter 
> >>> being more likely to be insecure. 
> >>>
> >>> However, OCB is apparently faster than schemes that do 
> >>> authentication/encryption separately. It used to be patent-encumbered, 
> >>> but as of January 2013, the creator is giving an exception to open source 
> >>> projects.[4] 
> > 
> > It's essentially an adapted form of CBC. (Which means it's vulnerable to 
> > weak IVs, but that's not a big deal). So effectively it encrypts every 
> > block twice, as opposed to taking an HMAC at the end (= one hash of the 
> > whole packet and then one single block hash). Is hashing that much slower 
> > than crypto?
> 
> OCB uses the underlying block cipher *once* for each block of plaintext,
> whereas encrypt/mac combination schemes use it twice.

Okay then we should use it. We'll have to figure out how long a tag we want, 
and it degrades after 4PB, but since we rekey every half hour that's not a 
problem! :)

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