1.3. Benefits

1.3. Benefits

The AEAD approach enables applications that need cryptographic security services to more easily adopt those services. It benefits the application designer by allowing them to focus on important issues such as security services, canonicalization, and data marshaling, and relieving them of the need to design crypto mechanisms that meet their security goals. Importantly, the security of an AEAD algorithm can be analyzed independent from its use in a particular application. This property frees the user of the AEAD of the need to consider security aspects such as the relative order of authentication and encryption and the security of the particular combination of cipher and MAC, such as the potential loss of confidentiality through the MAC. The application designer that uses the AEAD interface need not select a particular AEAD algorithm during the design stage. Additionally, the interface to the AEAD is relatively simple, since it requires only a single key as input and requires only a single identifier to indicate the algorithm in use in a particular case.

The AEAD approach benefits the implementer of the crypto algorithms by making available optimizations that are otherwise not possible to reduce the amount of computation, the implementation cost, and/or the storage requirements. The simpler interface makes testing easier; this is a considerable benefit for a crypto algorithm implementation. By providing a uniform interface to access cryptographic services, the AEAD approach allows a single crypto implementation to more easily support multiple applications. For example, a hardware module that supports the AEAD interface can easily provide crypto acceleration to any application using that interface, even to applications that had not been designed when the module was built.