International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Authentication and authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) are applied in cryptographic protocols to provide message integrity. The definitions in the literature and the constructions used in practice all protect against forgeries, but offer varying levels of protection against replays, reordering, and drops. As a result of the lack of a systematic hierarchy of authentication and AEAD security notions, gaps have arisen in the literature, specifically in the provable security analysis of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. We present a hierarchy of authentication and AEAD security notions, interpolating between the lowest level of protection (against forgeries) and the highest level (against forgeries, replays, reordering, and drops). We show generically how to construct higher level schemes from a basic scheme and appropriate use of sequence numbers, and apply that to close the gap in the analysis of TLS record layer encryption.