Abstract

This talk discusses implementation strategies for (authenticated) AES encryption to achieve resistance against cache-timing attacks without a penalty in performance.

Namely, we present a bitsliced implementation of AES encryption in counter mode for 64-bit Intel processors. Running at 7.59 cycles/byte on a Core 2, it is up to 25% faster than previous implementations, while simultaneously offering protection against timing attacks. In particular, it is the only cache-timing-attack resistant implementation offering competitive speeds for stream as well as for packet encryption: for 576-byte packets, we improve performance over previous bitsliced implementations by more than a factor of 2. We also report more than 30% improved speeds for lookup-table based Galois/Counter mode authentication, achieving 10.68 cycles/byte for authenticated encryption. Furthermore, we present the first constant-time implementation of AES -GCM that has a reasonable speed of 21.99 cycles/byte, thus offering a full suite of timing-analysis resistant software for authenticated encryption.

This is joint work with Peter Schwabe from TU Eindhoven.