StrongBox: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Performance using Stream Ciphers for Full Drive Encryption Bernard Dickens III Haryadi Gunawi Ariel J. Feldman Henry Hoffmann Computer Science University of Chicago bd3,haryadi,arielfeldman,
[email protected] Abstract easily lost or stolen. The current standard for securing data at Full drive encryption (FDE) is especially important for mo- rest is to use the AES cipher in XTS mode [21, 28]. Unfortu- bile devices because they contain large amounts of sensitive nately, employing AES-XTS increases read/write latency by 3–5 compared to unencrypted storage. data yet are easily lost or stolen. Unfortunately, the stan- × dard approach to FDE—AES in XTS mode—is 3–5x slower It is well known that authenticated encryption using stream than unencrypted storage. Authenticated encryption based ciphers—such as ChaCha20 [4]—is faster than using AES on stream ciphers is already used as a faster alternative to (see Section 2). Indeed, Google made the case for stream AES in other contexts, such as HTTPS, but the conventional ciphers over AES, switching HTTPS connections on Chrome wisdom is that stream ciphers are unsuitable for FDE. Used for Android to use a stream cipher for better performance [30]. naively in drive encryption, stream ciphers are vulnerable to Stream ciphers are not used for FDE, however, for two rea- attacks, and mitigating these attacks with on-drive metadata sons: (1) confidentiality and (2) performance. First, when is generally believed to ruin performance. applied naively to stored data, stream ciphers are trivially In this paper, we argue that recent developments in mo- vulnerable to attacks—including many-time pad and rollback bile hardware invalidate this assumption, makimg it possible attacks—that reveal the plaintext by overwriting a secure to use fast stream ciphers for FDE.