Julius: Secure Mode of Operation for Authenticated Encryption Based on ECB and Finite Field Multiplications Lear Bahack∗ Submission to the CAESAR competition, version 1.0, March 2014 Gaius Julius Caesar, 100 BC – 44 BC. Source: Mcleclat, GNU, Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons. ∗Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. E-mail:
[email protected] 1 Abstract We present two new blockcipher modes of operation for authenti- cated encryption with associated data, designed to achieve the maxi- mal possible security in case of misused IV, while being efficient as the Galois/Counter Mode (GCM). Both of the modes are provably secure up to the birthday bound, are suitable for both software and hard- ware, and are based on GF(2128) multiplications by a secret element of the field. The Julius-CTR mode can be viewed as a certain variation combin- ing the GCM, SIV and Unbalanced Feistel Network, while the Julius- ECB mode can be viewed as a certain variation of the Naor-Reingold mode. We specify two versions for each mode: a regular version and a compact version, having different ciphertexts redundancies. Sev- eral variants aimed to achieve increased security, parallelization, and efficiency are briefly explored. Based on the two Julius modes of operation and the AES-128 block- cipher, we propose a family of four specific algorithms for authenti- cated encryption with associated data to the CAESAR competition. 1 Introduction Symmetric key authenticated encryption (AE) is in a sense the most basic and fundamental usage of cryptography. Although today’s cryptography is far broader and contains complicated algorithms aiming to achieve other (more complicated) goals, the vast majority of applications use "compli- cated" cryptographic algorithms only in addition to a "basic" symmetric key AE algorithm.