Nonce reuse/misuse resistance authentication encryption schemes for modern TLS cipher suites and QUIC based web servers

Abstract

Authentication Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) is a scheme that preserves the integrity of both the cipher text and authenticated data. In AEAD, cipher suites like GCM_SIV and AES_GCM_SIV provides the message integrity through nonce-based authentication encryption technique. The problem of nonce-based authentication encryption is the repetition of nonce in two different messages that violates message integrity property when the number of message blocks is maximized to 2³². This paper verifies the maximum limit of nonce usefulness and proves better security bounds attained in GCM_SIV and AES_GCM_SIV using nonce-reuse/misuse resistance authentication encryption (NRMR-AE) technique. The NRMR-AE resistance property achieves better security bounds and performance even when the nonces are repeated in different messages. But nonce repetition in NRMR-AE property reduces the number of message encryption and message length (in blocks) in GCM_SIV and AES_GCM_SIV AEAD methods used in QUIC(Quick UDP Internet Communications) and TLS Cipher suites which is found to be a greater drawback. This paper increases the number of messages encrypted even with maximum number of nonce repetition ensuring that the message length in AES_GCM_SIV meets the standard NIST bound 2^-32.