Laszlo,

On Dec 21, 2005, at 9:17 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

EME* essentially does two passes of ECB mode AES, plus three extra AES calls
It means, that a parallel implementation can perform all of the ECB mode
AES calls in the top and bottom row (a latency of 2), plus two of the
extra AES operations in the leftmost column (Figure 2 of the EME*
paper). We have a total delay of 4 AES operations, plus change. In case
of XCB the question boils down to how parallelizable is the GHash
operation. Because it is a hash function, it is basically sequential,
is not it?

Actually, GHASH is can be implemented in parallel, using an algebraic trick. See the last paragraph of Section 5 in http://csrc.nist.gov/ CryptoToolkit/modes/proposedmodes/gcm/gcm-revised-spec.pdf

This would give the advantage to EME*, unless there was a
parallel version of the function h in XCB.


You mean advantage in terms of latency, right? I'm not sure that this is the case, since both XCB and EME* need to do one pass over the data before any data can be output, and I suspect that the circuit depth of those two passes isn't much different. It would be interesting to see a detailed comparison. For that matter, it would be worthwhile to discuss the implementation scenarios enough to get a good idea of what the "success criteria" for wide-block modes like these are. (E.g. since all of these modes require the data to be buffered, what critical path should be measured? The path to output the first byte, or to output all of the bytes?)

For sequential implementation the speed relations depend on the speed of AES vs. a GHash block operation. A GHash step can be implemented faster
in HW, cannot it be?

Yes, the GF multiply can be done faster than an AES operation, though the details matter a lot. IIRC a multiply can be done in a single clock using a circuit that is about 25% the size of a fully pipelined AES implementation.

That would make the sequential XCB faster. How
about the royalties?


Are we supposed to talk about royalties on an IEEE list? At any rate, there has been a UC Davis statement on EME, but no statement on XCB. ABL is IPR free, but is more costly to implement than the other modes.

David

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