AEAD constructions
This operation:
Encrypts a message with a key and a nonce to keep it confidential
Computes an authentication tag. This tag is used to make sure that the
message, as well as optional, non-confidential (non-encrypted) data, haven't
been tampered with.
A typical use case for additional data is to authenticate protocol-specific metadata about the message, such as its length and encoding.
libsodium supports two popular constructions: AES256-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 (original version and IETF version), as well as a variant of the later with an extended nonce: XChaCha20-Poly1305.
The "combined mode" API of each construction appends the authentication tag to the ciphertext. The "detached mode" API stores the authentication tag in a separate location.
Construction | Key size | Nonce size | Block size | MAC size | Availability |
AES256-GCM | 256 bits | 96 bits | 128 bits | 128 bits | libsodium >= 1.0.4 but requires hardware support. IETF standard; also implemented in many other libraries. |
ChaCha20-Poly1305 | 256 bits | 64 bits | 512 bits | 128 bits | libsodium >= 0.6.0. Also implemented in {Libre,Open,Boring}SSL. |
ChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF | 256 bits | 96 bits | 512 bits | 128 bits | libsodium >= 1.0.4. IETF standard; also implemented in Ring, {Libre,Open,Boring}SSL and other libraries. |
XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF | 256 bits | 192 bits | 512 bits | 128 bits | libsodium >= 1.0.12. On the standard track. |
Construction | Max bytes for a single (key,nonce) | Max bytes for a single key |
AES256-GCM | ~ 64 GB | ~ 350 GB (for ~16 KB long messages) |
ChaCha20-Poly1305 | No practical limits (~ 2^64 bytes) | Up to 2^64* messages, no practical total size limits |
ChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF | 256 GB | Up to 2^64* messages, no practical total size limits |
XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF | No practical limits (~ 2^64 bytes) | Up to 2^64* messages, no practical total size limits |
These figures assume an untruncated (128-bit) authentication tag.
* Although periodic rekeying remains highly recommended, online protocols leveraging additional data to discard old messages don't have practical limitations on the total number of messages.
Construction | Safe options to choose a nonce |
AES256-GCM | Counter, permutation |
ChaCha20-Poly1305 | Counter, permutation |
ChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF | Counter, permutation |
XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF | Counter, permutation, random, Hk(random ‖ m) |
Hk represents a keyed hash function that is safe against length-extension attacks, such as BLAKE2 or the HMAC construction.
XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF is the safest choice.
Other choices are only present for interoperability with other libraries that don't implement XChaCha20-Poly1305-IETF yet.
The current implementation of this construction is hardware-accelerated and requires the Intel SSSE3 extensions, as well as the aesni and pclmul instructions.
Intel Westmere processors (introduced in 2010) and newer meet the requirements.
There are no plans to support non hardware-accelerated implementations of AES-GCM, as correctly mitigating side-channels in a software implementation comes with major speed tradeoffs, that defeat the whole point of AES-GCM over ChaCha20-Poly1305.
While AES is very fast on dedicated hardware, its performance on platforms that lack such hardware is considerably lower. Another problem is that many software AES implementations are vulnerable to cache-collision timing attacks.
ChaCha20 is considerably faster than AES in software-only implementations, making it around three times as fast on platforms that lack specialized AES hardware. ChaCha20 is also not sensitive to timing attacks.
Poly1305 is a high-speed message authentication code.
The combination of the ChaCha20 stream cipher with the Poly1305 authenticator was proposed in January 2014 as an alternative to the Salsa20-Poly1305 construction. ChaCha20-Poly1305 was implemented in major operating systems, web browsers and crypto libraries shortly after. It eventually became an official IETF standard in May 2015.
The ChaCha20-Poly1305 implementation in libsodium is portable across all supported architectures.
XChaCha20-Poly1305 applies the construction described in Daniel Bernstein's Extending the Salsa20 nonce paper to the ChaCha20 cipher in order to extend the nonce size to 192-bit.
This extended nonce size allows random nonces to be safely used, and also facilitates the construction of misuse-resistant schemes.
The XChaCha20-Poly1305 implementation in libsodium is portable across all supported architectures.
The main limitation of XChaCha20-Poly1305 is that it is not widely implemented in other libraries yet. However, it will soon become an IETF standard.
These functions accept an optional, arbitrary long "additional data" parameter. These data are not present in the ciphertext, but are mixed in the computation of the authentication tag.
A typical use for these data is to authenticate version numbers, timestamps or monotonically increasing counters in order to discard previous messages and prevent replay attacks.
Limits on Authenticated Encryption Use in TLS
(Atul Luykx, Kenneth G. Paterson).
