Poly1305

Poly1305 is a universal hash family designed by Daniel J. Bernstein for use in cryptography.

As with any universal hash family, Poly1305 can be used as a one-time message authentication code to authenticate a single message using a key shared between sender and recipient,
like a one-time pad can be used to conceal the content of a single message using a key shared between sender and recipient.

Originally Poly1305 was proposed as part of Poly1305-AES,
a Carter–Wegman authenticator
that combines the Poly1305 hash with AES-128 to authenticate many messages using a single short key and distinct message numbers.
Poly1305 was later applied with a single-use key generated for each message using XSalsa20 in the NaCl crypto_secretbox_xsalsa20poly1305 authenticated cipher,
and then using ChaCha in the ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated cipher
deployed in TLS on the internet.

Description

Definition of Poly1305

Poly1305 takes a 16-byte secret key $r$ and an $L$-byte message $m$ and returns a 16-byte hash $\operatorname_r(m)$.
To do this, Poly1305:

# Interprets $r$ as a little-endian 16-byte integer.
# Breaks the message m = (m m m \dotsc, m - 1 into consecutive 16-byte chunks.
# Interprets the 16-byte chunks as 17-byte little-endian integers by appending a 1 byte to every 16-byte chunk, to be used as coefficients of a polynomial.
# Evaluates the polynomial at the point $r$ modulo the prime $2^ - 5$.
# Reduces the result modulo $2^$ encoded in little-endian return a 16-byte hash.

The coefficients $c_i$ of the polynomial $c_1 r^q + c_2 r^ + \cdots + c_q r$, where $q = \lceil L/16\rceil$, are:

c_i = m 6i - 16+ 2^8 m 6i - 15+ 2^ m 6i - 14+ \cdots + 2^ m6i - 1+ 2^,

with the exception that, if $L \not\equiv 0 \pmod$, then:

c_q = m 6q - 16+ 2^8 m 6q - 15+ \cdots + 2^ m - 1+ 2^.

The secret key r = (r r r \dotsc, r 5 is restricted to have the bytes r r r 1 r 5\in \, ''i.e.'', to have their top four bits clear; and to have the bytes r r r 2\in \, ''i.e.'', to have their bottom two bits clear.
Thus there are $2^$ distinct possible values of $r$.

Use as a one-time authenticator

If $s$ is a secret 16-byte string interpreted as a little-endian integer, then

$a := \bigl(\operatorname_r(m) + s\bigr) \bmod 2^$

is called the authenticator for the message $m$.
If a sender and recipient share the 32-byte secret key $(r, s)$ in advance, chosen uniformly at random, then the sender can transmit an authenticated message $(a, m)$.
When the recipient receives an ''alleged'' authenticated message $(a', m')$ (which may have been modified in transmit by an adversary), they can verify its authenticity by testing whether

$a' \mathrel \bigl(\operatorname_r(m') + s\bigr) \bmod 2^.$
Without knowledge of $(r, s)$, the adversary has probability $8\lceil L/16\rceil/2^$ of finding any $(a', m') \ne (a, m)$ that will pass verification.

However, the same key $(r, s)$ must not be reused for two messages.
If the adversary learns

$\begin a_1 &= \bigl(\operatorname_r(m_1) + s\bigr) \bmod 2^, \\ a_2 &= \bigl(\operatorname_r(m_2) + s\bigr) \bmod 2^, \end$

for $m_1 \ne m_2$, they can subtract

$a_1 - a_2 \equiv \operatorname_r(m_1) - \operatorname_r(m_2) \pmod$

and find a root of the resulting polynomial to recover a small list of candidates for the secret evaluation point $r$, and from that the secret pad $s$.
The adversary can then use this to forge additional messages with high probability.

Use in Poly1305-AES as a Carter–Wegman authenticator

The original Poly1305-AES proposal uses the Carter–Wegman structure to authenticate many messages by taking $a_i := H_r(m_i) + p_i$ to be the authenticator on the $i^$ message $m_i$, where $H_r$ is a universal hash family and $p_i$ is an independent uniform random hash value that serves as a one-time pad to conceal it.
Poly1305-AES uses AES-128 to generate $p_i := \operatorname_k(i)$, where $i$ is encoded as a 16-byte little-endian integer.

Specifically, a Poly1305-AES key is a 32-byte pair $(r, k)$ of a 16-byte evaluation point $r$, as above, and a 16-byte AES key $k$.
The Poly1305-AES authenticator on a message $m_i$ is

$a_i := \bigl(\operatorname_r(m_i) + \operatorname_k(i)\bigr) \bmod 2^,$

where 16-byte strings and integers are identified by little-endian encoding.
Note that $r$ is reused between messages.

Without knowledge of $(r, k)$, the adversary has low probability of forging any authenticated messages that the recipient will accept as genuine.
Suppose the adversary sees $C$ authenticated messages and attempts $D$ forgeries, and can distinguish $\operatorname_k$ from a uniform random permutation with advantage at most $\delta$.
(Unless AES is broken, $\delta$ is very small.)
The adversary's chance of success at a single forgery is at most:

$\delta + \frac.$

The message number $i$ must never be repeated with the same key $(r, k)$.
If it is, the adversary can recover a small list of candidates for $r$ and $\operatorname_k(i)$, as with the one-time authenticator, and use that to forge messages.

Use in NaCl and ChaCha20-Poly1305

The NaCl crypto_secretbox_xsalsa20poly1305 authenticated cipher uses a message number $i$ with the XSalsa20 stream cipher to generate a per-message key stream, the first 32 bytes of which are taken as a one-time Poly1305 key $(r_i, s_i)$ and the rest of which is used for encrypting the message.
It then uses Poly1305 as a one-time authenticator for the ciphertext of the message.
ChaCha20-Poly1305 does the same but with ChaCha instead of XSalsa20.

Security

The security of Poly1305 and its derivatives against forgery follows from its bounded difference probability as a universal hash family:
If $m_1$ and $m_2$ are messages of up to $L$ bytes each, and $d$ is any 16-byte string interpreted as a little-endian integer, then

\Pr operatorname_r(m_1) - \operatorname_r(m_2) \equiv d \pmod \leq \frac,

where $r$ is a uniform random Poly1305 key.

This property is sometimes called $\epsilon$-almost-Δ-universality over $\mathbb Z/2^\mathbb Z$, or $\epsilon$-AΔU,
where $\epsilon = 8\lceil L/16\rceil/2^$ in this case.

Of one-time authenticator

With a one-time authenticator $a = \bigl(\operatorname_r(m) + s\bigr) \bmod 2^$, the adversary's success probability for any forgery attempt $(a', m')$ on a message $m'$ of up to $L$ bytes is:

\begin
\Pr a' = \operatorname_r(m') + s
\mathrel\mid a = \operatorname_r(m) + s\\
&= \Pr ' = \operatorname_r(m') + a - \operatorname_r(m)\\
&= \Pr operatorname_r(m') - \operatorname_r(m) = a' - a\\
&\leq 8\lceil L/16\rceil/2^.
\end

Here arithmetic inside the \Pr cdots/math> is taken to be in $\mathbb Z/2^\mathbb Z$ for simplicity.

Of NaCl and ChaCha20-Poly1305

For NaCl crypto_secretbox_xsalsa20poly1305 and ChaCha20-Poly1305, the adversary's success probability at forgery is the same for each message independently as for a one-time authenticator, plus the adversary's distinguishing advantage $\delta$ against XSalsa20 or ChaCha as pseudorandom functions used to generate the per-message key.
In other words, the probability that the adversary succeeds at a single forgery after $D$ attempts of messages up to $L$ bytes is at most:

$\delta + \frac.$

Of Poly1305-AES

The security of Poly1305-AES against forgery follows from the Carter–Wegman–Shoup structure, which instantiates a Carter–Wegman authenticator with a permutation to generate the per-message pad.
If an adversary sees $C$ authenticated messages and attempts $D$ forgeries of messages of up to $L$ bytes, and if the adversary has distinguishing advantage at most $\delta$ against AES-128 as a pseudorandom permutation, then the probability the adversary succeeds at any one of the $D$ forgeries is at most:

$\delta + \frac.$

Speed

Poly1305-AES can be computed at high speed in various CPUs: for an ''n''-byte message, no more than 3.1''n'' + 780 Athlon cycles are needed, for example.
The author has released optimized source code for Athlon, Pentium Pro/II/III/M, PowerPC, and UltraSPARC, in addition to non-optimized reference implementations in C and C++ as public domain software.A state-of-the-art message-authentication code
on cr.yp.to

Implementations

Below is a list of cryptography libraries that support Poly1305:

* Botan
* Bouncy Castle
* Crypto++
* Libgcrypt
* libsodium
* Nettle
* OpenSSL
* LibreSSL
* wolfCrypt
* GnuTLS
* mbed TLS
* MatrixSSL

See also

* ChaCha20-Poly1305 – an AEAD scheme combining the stream cipher ChaCha20 with a variant of Poly1305

References

External links

Poly1305-AES
reference and optimized implementation by author D. J. Bernstein

Fast Poly1305 implementation in C
on github.com
* NaClbr>one-time authenticator
an

using Poly1305

{{Cryptography navbox , hash

Advanced Encryption Standard
Internet Standards
Message authentication codes
Public-domain software with source code