Design of fast AES-based Universal Hash Functions and MACs

Ultra-fast AES round-based software cryptographic authentication/encryption primitives have recently seen important developments, fuelled by the authenticated encryption competition CAESAR and the prospect of future high-profile applications such as post-5G telecommunication technology security standards. In particular, Universal Hash Functions (UHF) are crucial primitives used as core components in many popular modes of operation for various use-cases, such as Message Authentication Codes (MACs), authenticated encryption, wide block ciphers, accordion modes, etc. In this talk, we present a strategy to improve upon existing design approaches and describe a general framework for the construction of UHFs, relying only on the AES round function and 128-bit word-wide XORs. From this framework, we propose two new fast UHFs and construct two MACs based on these UHFs, LeMac and PetitMac. LeMac achieves the fastest speed to this day on x86 recent processors.