Stefan Bühler <[email protected]> writes:

> The RFC explicitly supports a range of nonce sizes; I think the
> overhead of supporting them is so small that I don't see why not to
> just add it and be done with it :)

Maybe. We'd then need all of a minimun, a maximum, and a
default/recommended value. I don't think we should have what the rfc
calls randomized or stateful algorithms at this level.

What should the minimum value be? Both eax and gcm could have minimum
value 0 and maximum value UINT_MAX, since they both hash the nonce as
needed. Actually using an empty nonce means that one can process only a
single message with each key. 

The gcm spec allows arbitrary nonce size, and with size != 12 the nonce
is hashed. But I don't know if this is a feature anyone is using? RFC
5116 specifies a fix size of 12 bytes for gcm. (Restricting to 12 bytes
would make it natural to support auto-increment of the nonce).

> I'm not sure I'm reading this correctly, but to me this means that an
> AEDA algorithm could have an "authentication tag length" parameter, but
> would have to pad it to the maximum tag length it supports, as
> otherwise the length of the ciphertext would depend on that parameter,
> making such parameter completely useless.

I think that with different tag lengths, you would have a separate aead
algorithms in the rfc definition for each possible tag size. At least,
that's one way to make sense of it.

> Also the RFC doesn't specify a "streaming" interface (afaik); for
> example an AEAD algorithm could process the plain text data before the
> additional data.

Algorithms of interest do support streaming mode, though, and I think
it's viewed as a desirable feature.

> Also some algorithms may need to know the length of the plain text in
> advance (CCM for example).

I'm not really familiar with ccm, I've only read the critique of it in
the eax paper. But that sounds like it's killing streaming operations.

Regards,
/Niels

-- 
Niels Möller. PGP-encrypted email is preferred. Keyid C0B98E26.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.
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