The poly1305-AES message-authentication code

Abstract

Poly1305-AES is a state-of-the-art message-authentication code suitable for a wide variety of applications. Poly1305-AES computes a 16-byte authenticator of a variable-length message, using a 16-byte AES key, a 16-byte additional key, and a 16-byte nonce. The security of Poly1305-AES is very close to the security of AES; the security gap is at most 14D⌊L/16⌋/2106 if messages have at most L bytes, the attacker sees at most 264 authenticated messages, and the attacker attempts D forgeries. Poly1305-AES can be computed at extremely high speed: for example, fewer than 3.1ℓ + 780 Athlon cycles for an ℓ-byte message. This speed is achieved without precomputation; consequently, 1000 keys can be handled simultaneously without cache misses. Special-purpose hardware can compute Poly1305-AES at even higher speed. Poly1305-AES is parallelizable, incremental, and not subject to any intellectual-property claims. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2005.