Paper 2023/794

Areion: Highly-Efficient Permutations and Its Applications (Extended Version)

Abstract

In real-world applications, the overwhelming majority of cases require (authenticated) encryption or hashing with relatively short input, say up to 2K bytes. Almost all TCP/IP packets are 40 to 1.5K bytes, and the maximum packet lengths of major protocols, e.g., Zigbee, Bluetooth low energy, and Controller Area Network (CAN), are less than 128 bytes. However, existing schemes are not well optimized for short input. To bridge the gap between real-world needs (in the future) and limited performances of state-of-the-art hash functions and authenticated encryptions with associated data (AEADs) for short input, we design a family of wide-block permutations Areion that fully leverages the power of AES instructions, which are widely deployed in many devices. As for its applications, we propose several hash functions and AEADs. Areion significantly outperforms existing schemes for short input and even competitive to relatively long messages. Indeed, our hash function is surprisingly fast, and its performance is less than three cycles/byte in the latest Intel architecture for any message size. It is significantly much faster than existing state-of-the-art schemes for short messages up to around 100 bytes, which are the most widely-used input size in real-world applications, on both the latest CPU architectures (IceLake, Tiger Lake, and Alder Lake) and mobile platforms (Pixel 7, iPhone 14, and iPad Pro with Apple M2).