Re: [RFC PATCH] crypto: chacha20 - add implementation using 96-bit nonce

Martin Willi
2017-12-11T07:38:45Z

Hi,

> Anyway, I actually thought it was intentional that the ChaCha
> implementations in the Linux kernel allowed specifying the block
> counter, and therefore allowed seeking to any point in the keystream,
> exposing the full functionality of the cipher.

If I remember correctly, it was indeed intentional. When building the
chacha20poly1305 AEAD both in [1] and [2], a block counter of 0 is used
to generate the Poly1305 key. For the ChaCha20 encryption, an explicit
initial block counter of 1 is used to avoid reusing the same counter.

Maybe it would be possible to implement this with implicit counters,
but doing this explicitly looked much clearer to me. So I guess there
are use cases for explicit block counters in ChaCha20.

Best regards
Martin

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7539#section-2.8
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7634#section-2

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