4. Security Considerations
4. Security Considerations
The ChaCha20 cipher is designed to provide 256-bit security.
The Poly1305 authenticator is designed to ensure that forged messages are rejected with a probability of 1-(n/(2^102)) for a 16n-byte message, even after sending 2^64 legitimate messages, so it is SUF-CMA (strong unforgeability against chosen-message attacks) in the terminology of [AE].
Proving the security of either of these is beyond the scope of this document. Such proofs are available in the referenced academic papers ([ChaCha], [Poly1305], [LatinDances], [LatinDances2], and [Zhenqing2012]).
The most important security consideration in implementing this document is the uniqueness of the nonce used in ChaCha20. Counters and LFSRs are both acceptable ways of generating unique nonces, as is encrypting a counter using a block cipher with a 64-bit block size such as DES. Note that it is not acceptable to use a truncation of a counter encrypted with block ciphers with 128-bit or 256-bit blocks, because such a truncation may repeat after a short time.
Consequences of repeating a nonce: If a nonce is repeated, then both the one-time Poly1305 key and the keystream are identical between the messages. This reveals the XOR of the plaintexts, because the XOR of the plaintexts is equal to the XOR of the ciphertexts.
The Poly1305 key MUST be unpredictable to an attacker. Randomly generating the key would fulfill this requirement, except that Poly1305 is often used in communications protocols, so the receiver should know the key. Pseudorandom number generation such as by encrypting a counter is acceptable. Using ChaCha with a secret key and a nonce is also acceptable.
The algorithms presented here were designed to be easy to implement in constant time to avoid side-channel vulnerabilities. The operations used in ChaCha20 are all additions, XORs, and fixed rolls. All of these can and should be implemented in constant time. Access to offsets into the ChaCha state and the number of operations do not depend on any property of the key, eliminating the chance of information about the key leaking through the timing of cache misses.
For Poly1305, the operations are addition, multiplication. and modulus, all on numbers with greater than 128 bits. This can be done in constant time, but a naive implementation (such as using some generic big number library) will not be constant time. For example, if the multiplication is performed as a separate operation from the modulus, the result will sometimes be under 2^256 and sometimes be above 2^256. Implementers should be careful about timing side-channels for Poly1305 by using the appropriate implementation of these operations.
Validating the authenticity of a message involves a bitwise comparison of the calculated tag with the received tag. In most use cases, nonces and AAD contents are not "used up" until a valid message is received. This allows an attacker to send multiple identical messages with different tags until one passes the tag comparison. This is hard if the attacker has to try all 2^128 possible tags one by one. However, if the timing of the tag comparison operation reveals how long a prefix of the calculated and received tags is identical, the number of messages can be reduced significantly. For this reason, with online protocols, implementation MUST use a constant-time comparison function rather than relying on optimized but insecure library functions such as the C language's memcmp().
Additionally, any protocol using this algorithm MUST include the complete tag to minimize the opportunity for forgery. Tag truncation MUST NOT be done.