ARX-KW

This library features Rust implementations of the ARX-KW family of novel Key Wrap constructions.

Background

ARX-KW was first presented in this paper written by Satō Shinichi and submitted to the IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive in January 2020. As the name suggests, these constructions make extensive use of add-rotate-xor algorithms: each of the four variants specified involves both the SipHash-2-4 pseudorandom function with 128-bit output and a stream cipher from the ChaCha family of stream ciphers.

ARX-KW is a cipher for deteministic, authenticated encryption which aims to provide strong authenticity and confidentiality while minimizing the storage overhead and simplicity of use when compared to existing constructions using the ChaCha cipher either which require keeping state for a nonce and a block counter or have a substantial storage overhead in order to manage the nonce statelessly.

ARX-KW has a static overhead of 128 bits for each of its four variants without the need to keep state for the nonce used by ChaCha, making the storage overhead only 50% for a 256-bit key

Use

Features

Use the nightly feature to enable SIMD parallelization of the ChaCha computations (nightly Rust required):

Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
arx-kw = {version = "0.2", features = ["nightly"]}

When

As noted above, the ARX-KW constructions are Key Wrap algorithms, designed and intended to protect other cryptographic keys using symmetric encryption. It is important to note that ARX-KW, like all Key Wrap constructions, was designed with the expectation that its input data is highly entropic, as is the case with secret cryptographic keys. This is because it is a deterministic encryption scheme and will always yield the same ciphertext output for a given input; if used to encrypt low-entropy data (as with general-purpose encryption schemes), it is vulnerable to "leakage", described here:

Deterministic encryption can leak information to an eavesdropper, who may recognize known ciphertexts. For example, when an adversary learns that a given ciphertext corresponds to some interesting message, they can learn something every time that ciphertext is transmitted. To gain information about the meaning of various ciphertexts, an adversary might perform a statistical analysis of messages transmitted over an encrypted channel, or attempt to correlate ciphertexts with observed actions (e.g., noting that a given ciphertext is always received immediately before a submarine dive). If used to store secret key material (by nature high entropy), this is not an issue as an attacker gains no information about the key encapsulated within.

How

Add arx_kw = "0.2" to your Cargo.toml dependencies section.

Each public module of this crate contains a struct corresponding to one of the four specified ARX-KW-8-2-4 variants: ARX-8-2-4-E, ARX-8-2-4-G, ARX-8-2-4-EX, and ARX-8-2-4-GX. If you're not sure which to use, gx::GX is recommended. The functionality is provided by the ArxKW trait, so that will need to be in scope to use the encrypt and decrypt methods.

The ConstantTimeEq trait from the subtle crate is re-exported by this crate and is implemented on the AuthTag type as well as those covered by the blanket implementations subtle provides.

Eq and PartialEq are by design not implemented for AuthTag to discourage equality checking that is not O(1), but the internal [u8;16] is public should you want to live

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extern crate hex;
extern crate arx-kw;
use arx_kw::{
  ArxKW,
  gx::GX,
  ConstantTimeEq, // From the subtle crate, allows for equality checking in constant time
  // (impl'd for AuthTag and re-exported by this crate)
  assert_ct_eq,
  AuthTag
};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
  Encrypt a key using ARX-KW-8-2-4-GX

  The values used here are from the test vectors in the original ARX-KW paper.
  Inputs
  k = <[u8; 32]>::from_hex("000102030405060708090a0b0c0d0e0f101112131415161718191a1b1c1d1e1f")?; // The key we are using to wrap the plaintext secret key
  let p = <[u8; 32]>::from_hex("deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef")?; // The plaintext secret key we want to store/transport securely
  // Expected outputs
  let c_expected = <[u8; 32]>::from_hex("2f83f391c97f3606ccd5709c6ee15d66cd7e65a2aeb7dc3066636e8f6b0d39c3")?; // The ciphertext which contains the wrapped key.

  The authentication tag. Note that we wrap this in AuthTag() rather than just using a [u8;16] so that we get constant time equality checking
  let t_expected = AuthTag(<[u8; 16]>::from_hex("016325cf6a3c4b2e3b039675e1ccbc65")?);
  // Perform the encryption, returning the encrypted ciphertext and the authentication tag.
  let (ciphertext, authentication_tag) = GX::encrypt(&k, &p)?;
  assert_ct_eq!(ciphertext, &c_expected);
  assert_ct_eq!(authentication_tag, &t_expected);

  // Decrypt the wrapped key

  let plaintext = GX::decrypt(&k, &ciphertext, &authentication_tag)?;
  // The authentication tag is checked during decryption and will return an error if the tags do not match
  assert_ct_eq!(plaintext, &p);
  Ok(())
}

Benchmarks

The benches directory contains encrypt and decrypt benchmarks for each ARX-KW variant. This crate uses the criterion crate for benchmarking, so the benchmarks can be run on stable or nightly Rust and offer more detailed output.

My Benchmarks

Conducted using the criterion crate on my machine using the nightly feature with a Ryzen 1700 @ 3.8 GHz and 8GB of RAM at 3000MHz.

Benchmarks

Prefer to run your own?

To run benchmarks without SIMD:

cargo bench

To run benchmarks with SIMD:

cargo --features nightly bench

If you run the benchmarks without the nightly feature and then with it, the output will show you the change in execution time, for those curious.

Tests

Tests for encryption and decryption are provided for each of the four variants and use the test vectors from the original ARX-KW paper, along with a couple of doctests. They can be run using cargo test

Documentation

Documentation for the latest crate version is available here:

docs.rs Or for the latest commit to the main branch of this repository:
Main Branch

arx-kw 0.2.13