PFC-CTR, PFC-OCB: Efficient stream cipher modes of authencryption

Abstract

ABSTRACTAuthencryption is a cryptographic process of providing confidentiality and integrity protection of messages in a single pass, simultaneously, without any support of conventional checksum, MAC, or hash function. This article encompasses the process to construct the stream cipher-based authencryption environment, where the keystream is generated from any secure block algorithm like AES. Accordingly, in order to demonstrate the working principle of authencryption in the stream cipher environment, the authors introduce two stream cipher modes of authencryption, namely, PFC-CTR and PFC-OCB. PFC-CTR denotes the counter-based authencryption environment, and PFC-OCB specifies the authencryption environment built upon the underlying foundation of OCB. They argue that both of the proposed stream cipher modes of authencryption are quite robust against several active attacks (e.g., message stream modification attacks, known-plain-text attacks, and chosen-plain-text attacks). At the same time, they can efficiently deal with other issues like “limited error propagation,” and so on, existing in several conventional stream cipher modes of operation like CFB, OFB, and CTR.