OREANDA-NEWS. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that in collaboration with the University of Fukui they have jointly developed an authenticated encryption algorithm offering robust resistance to multiple misuse. The algorithm has been entered in the Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness (CAESAR) project, based on which the algorithm is expected to be deployed for increasingly secure and reliable information technology.

The new algorithm’s major advantage is its resistance to multiple misuse in authenticated encryption operations that provide simultaneous confidentiality and integrity.

One problem of misuse is an attacker making a fake message if plaintexts are released before their integrity is verified. Once a conventional system outputs decrypted plaintext from tampered data without authentication, the attacker can show tampered data as being non-tampered. Whereas this occurs with many conventional systems, the new algorithm fixes the problem, thereby enabling relatively low-memory devices to handle large-volume data.

Another typical problem is the reuse of nonce. In the case of a common authentication algorithm called Advanced Encryption Standard with Galois Counter Mode (AES-GCM), a non-repeatable special parameter, or nonce, is required to achieve security. However, the algorithm is largely bleached if the nonce is reused, so the new algorithm fixes this problem to maintain security even after multiple reuse.

The new algorithm accepts messages longer than the 64-gigabyte limit of AES-GCM, and it works faster than AES-GCM on many platforms.