The inverse MixColumns operation is already used internally for
AES decryption, but it wasn’t exposed in the public API because
it didn’t seem necessary at the time.
Since then, several new AES-based block ciphers and permutations
(such as Vistrutah and Areion) have been developed, and they require
this operation to be implementable in Zig.
Since then, new interesting AES-based block ciphers and permutations
(Vistrutah, Areion, etc). have been invented, and require that
operation to be implementable in Zig.
* std.crypto.aes: introduce AES block vectors
Modern Intel CPUs with the VAES extension can handle more than a
single AES block per instruction.
So can some ARM and RISC-V CPUs. Software implementations with
bitslicing can also greatly benefit from this.
Implement low-level operations on AES block vectors, and the
parallel AEGIS variants on top of them.
AMD Zen4:
aegis-128x4: 73225 MiB/s
aegis-128x2: 51571 MiB/s
aegis-128l: 25806 MiB/s
aegis-256x4: 46742 MiB/s
aegis-256x2: 30227 MiB/s
aegis-256: 8436 MiB/s
aes128-gcm: 5926 MiB/s
aes256-gcm: 5085 MiB/s
AES-GCM, and anything based on AES-CTR are also going to benefit
from this later.
* Make AEGIS-MAC twice a fast
Use inline to vastly simplify the exposed API. This allows a
comptime-known endian parameter to be propogated, making extra functions
for a specific endianness completely unnecessary.
And when we have the choice, favor little-endian because it's 2023.
Gives a slight performance improvement:
md5: 552 -> 555 MiB/s
sha1: 768 -> 786 MiB/s
sha512: 211 -> 217 MiB/s
Most of this migration was performed automatically with `zig fmt`. There
were a few exceptions which I had to manually fix:
* `@alignCast` and `@addrSpaceCast` cannot be automatically rewritten
* `@truncate`'s fixup is incorrect for vectors
* Test cases are not formatted, and their error locations change
* Add configurable side channels mitigations; enable them on soft AES
Our software AES implementation doesn't have any mitigations against
side channels.
Go's generic implementation is not protected at all either, and even
OpenSSL only has minimal mitigations.
Full mitigations against cache-based attacks (bitslicing, fixslicing)
come at a huge performance cost, making AES-based primitives pretty
much useless for many applications. They also don't offer any
protection against other classes of side channel attacks.
In practice, partially protected, or even unprotected implementations
are not as bad as it sounds. Exploiting these side channels requires
an attacker that is able to submit many plaintexts/ciphertexts and
perform accurate measurements. Noisy measurements can still be
exploited, but require a significant amount of attempts. Wether this
is exploitable or not depends on the platform, application and the
attacker's proximity.
So, some libraries made the choice of minimal mitigations and some
use better mitigations in spite of the performance hit. It's a
tradeoff (security vs performance), and there's no one-size-fits all
implementation.
What applies to AES applies to other cryptographic primitives.
For example, RSA signatures are very sensible to fault attacks,
regardless of them using the CRT or not. A mitigation is to verify
every produced signature. That also comes with a performance cost.
Wether to do it or not depends on wether fault attacks are part of
the threat model or not.
Thanks to Zig's comptime, we can try to address these different
requirements.
This PR adds a `side_channels_protection` global, that can later
be complemented with `fault_attacks_protection` and possibly other
knobs.
It can have 4 different values:
- `none`: which doesn't enable additional mitigations.
"Additional", because it only disables mitigations that don't have
a big performance cost. For example, checking authentication tags
will still be done in constant time.
- `basic`: which enables mitigations protecting against attacks in
a common scenario, where an attacker doesn't have physical access to
the device, cannot run arbitrary code on the same thread, and cannot
conduct brute-force attacks without being throttled.
- `medium`: which enables additional mitigations, offering practical
protection in a shared environement.
- `full`: which enables all the mitigations we have.
The tradeoff is that the more mitigations we enable, the bigger the
performance hit will be. But this let applications choose what's
best for their use case.
`medium` is the default.
Currently, this only affects software AES, but that setting can
later be used by other primitives.
For AES, our implementation is a traditional table-based, with 4
32-bit tables and a sbox.
Lookups in that table have been replaced by function calls. These
functions can add a configurable noise level, making cache-based
attacks more difficult to conduct.
In the `none` mitigation level, the behavior is exactly the same
as before. Performance also remains the same.
In other levels, we compress the T tables into a single one, and
read data from multiple cache lines (all of them in `full` mode),
for all bytes in parallel. More precise measurements and way more
attempts become necessary in order to find correlations.
In addition, we use distinct copies of the sbox for key expansion
and encryption, so that they don't share the same L1 cache entries.
The best known attacks target the first two AES round, or the last
one.
While future attacks may improve on this, AES achieves full
diffusion after 4 rounds. So, we can relax the mitigations after
that. This is what this implementation does, enabling mitigations
again for the last two rounds.
In `full` mode, all the rounds are protected.
The protection assumes that lookups within a cache line are secret.
The cachebleed attack showed that it can be circumvented, but
that requires an attacker to be able to abuse hyperthreading and
run code on the same core as the encryption, which is rarely a
practical scenario.
Still, the current AES API allows us to transparently switch to
using fixslicing/bitslicing later when the `full` mitigation level
is enabled.
* Software AES: use little-endian representation.
Virtually all platforms are little-endian these days, so optimizing
for big-endian CPUs doesn't make sense any more.
We already have a LICENSE file that covers the Zig Standard Library. We
no longer need to remind everyone that the license is MIT in every single
file.
Previously this was introduced to clarify the situation for a fork of
Zig that made Zig's LICENSE file harder to find, and replaced it with
their own license that required annual payments to their company.
However that fork now appears to be dead. So there is no need to
reinforce the copyright notice in every single file.
- use `PascalCase` for all types. So, AES256GCM is now Aes256Gcm.
- consistently use `_length` instead of mixing `_size` and `_length` for the
constants we expose
- Use `minimum_key_length` when it represents an actual minimum length.
Otherwise, use `key_length`.
- Require output buffers (for ciphertexts, macs, hashes) to be of the right
size, not at least of that size in some functions, and the exact size elsewhere.
- Use a `_bits` suffix instead of `_length` when a size is represented as a
number of bits to avoid confusion.
- Functions returning a constant-sized slice are now defined as a slice instead
of a pointer + a runtime assertion. This is the case for most hash functions.
- Use `camelCase` for all functions instead of `snake_case`.
No functional changes, but these are breaking API changes.
Showcase that Zig can be a great option for high performance cryptography.
The AEGIS family of authenticated encryption algorithms was selected for
high-performance applications in the final portfolio of the CAESAR
competition.
They reuse the AES core function, but are substantially faster than the
CCM, GCM and OCB modes while offering a high level of security.
AEGIS algorithms are especially fast on CPUs with built-in AES support, and
the 128L variant fully takes advantage of the pipeline in modern Intel CPUs.
Performance of the Zig implementation is on par with libsodium.
* Reorganize crypto/aes in order to separate parameters, implementations and
modes.
* Add a zero-cost abstraction over the internal representation of a block,
so that blocks can be kept in vector registers in optimized implementations.
* Add architecture-independent aesenc/aesdec/aesenclast/aesdeclast operations,
so that any AES-based primitive can be implemented, including these that don't
use the original key schedule (AES-PRF, AEGIS, MeowHash...)
* Add support for parallelization/wide blocks to take advantage of hardware
implementations.
* Align T-tables to cache lines in the software implementations to slightly
reduce side channels.
* Add an optimized implementation for modern Intel CPUs with AES-NI.
* Add new tests (AES256 key expansion).
* Reimplement the counter mode to work with any block cipher, any endianness
and to take advantage of wide blocks.
* Add benchmarks for AES.
