IACR News item: 21 June 2015
Debrup Chakraborty, Cuauhtemoc Mancillas-Lopez, Palash Sarkar
ePrint Reportencryption. It has been almost canonised that an encryption scheme suitable for the application of disk encryption must be
length preserving, i.e., it rules out the use of schemes like authenticated encryption where an authentication tag is also
produced as a part of the ciphertext resulting in ciphertexts being longer than the corresponding plaintexts. The notion of
a tweakable enciphering scheme (TES) has been formalised as the appropriate primitive for disk encryption and it has been argued
that they provide the maximum security possible for a tag-less scheme. On the other hand, TESs are less efficient than some
existing authenticated encryption schemes. Also TES cannot provide true authentication as they do not have authentication tags.
In this paper, we analyze the possibility of the use of encryption schemes where length expansion is produced for
the purpose of disk encryption. On the negative side, we argue that nonce based authenticated encryption schemes are not appropriate
for this application. On the positive side, we demonstrate that deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE) schemes may
have more advantages than disadvantages compared to a TES when used for disk encryption. Finally, we propose a new deterministic
authenticated encryption scheme called BCTR which is suitable for this purpose. We provide the full specification of BCTR, prove
its security and also report an efficient implementation in reconfigurable hardware. Our experiments suggests that BCTR performs
significantly better than existing TESs and existing DAE schemes.
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