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crypto: aes - add generic time invariant AES cipher
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Lookup table based AES is sensitive to timing attacks, which is due to
the fact that such table lookups are data dependent, and the fact that
8 KB worth of tables covers a significant number of cachelines on any
architecture, resulting in an exploitable correlation between the key
and the processing time for known plaintexts.

For network facing algorithms such as CTR, CCM or GCM, this presents a
security risk, which is why arch specific AES ports are typically time
invariant, either through the use of special instructions, or by using
SIMD algorithms that don't rely on table lookups.

For generic code, this is difficult to achieve without losing too much
performance, but we can improve the situation significantly by switching
to an implementation that only needs 256 bytes of table data (the actual
S-box itself), which can be prefetched at the start of each block to
eliminate data dependent latencies.

This code encrypts at ~25 cycles per byte on ARM Cortex-A57 (while the
ordinary generic AES driver manages 18 cycles per byte on this
hardware). Decryption is substantially slower.

Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <[email protected]>
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Ard Biesheuvel authored and herbertx committed Feb 11, 2017
1 parent ec38a93 commit b5e0b03
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17 changes: 17 additions & 0 deletions crypto/Kconfig
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -895,6 +895,23 @@ config CRYPTO_AES

See <http://csrc.nist.gov/CryptoToolkit/aes/> for more information.

config CRYPTO_AES_TI
tristate "Fixed time AES cipher"
select CRYPTO_ALGAPI
help
This is a generic implementation of AES that attempts to eliminate
data dependent latencies as much as possible without affecting
performance too much. It is intended for use by the generic CCM
and GCM drivers, and other CTR or CMAC/XCBC based modes that rely
solely on encryption (although decryption is supported as well, but
with a more dramatic performance hit)

Instead of using 16 lookup tables of 1 KB each, (8 for encryption and
8 for decryption), this implementation only uses just two S-boxes of
256 bytes each, and attempts to eliminate data dependent latencies by
prefetching the entire table into the cache at the start of each
block.

config CRYPTO_AES_586
tristate "AES cipher algorithms (i586)"
depends on (X86 || UML_X86) && !64BIT
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions crypto/Makefile
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -99,6 +99,7 @@ obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_TWOFISH) += twofish_generic.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_TWOFISH_COMMON) += twofish_common.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_SERPENT) += serpent_generic.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES) += aes_generic.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES_TI) += aes_ti.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_CAMELLIA) += camellia_generic.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_CAST_COMMON) += cast_common.o
obj-$(CONFIG_CRYPTO_CAST5) += cast5_generic.o
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