Now that the generic implementation of ChaCha20 has been refactored to
allow varying the number of rounds, add support for XChaCha12, which is
the XSalsa construction applied to ChaCha12. ChaCha12 is one of the
three ciphers specified by the original ChaCha paper
(https://cr.yp.to/chacha/chacha-20080128.pdf: "ChaCha, a variant of
Salsa20"), alongside ChaCha8 and ChaCha20. ChaCha12 is faster than
ChaCha20 but has a lower, but still large, security margin.
We need XChaCha12 support so that it can be used in the Adiantum
encryption mode, which enables disk/file encryption on low-end mobile
devices where AES-XTS is too slow as the CPUs lack AES instructions.
We'd prefer XChaCha20 (the more popular variant), but it's too slow on
some of our target devices, so at least in some cases we do need the
XChaCha12-based version. In more detail, the problem is that Adiantum
is still much slower than we're happy with, and encryption still has a
quite noticeable effect on the feel of low-end devices. Users and
vendors push back hard against encryption that degrades the user
experience, which always risks encryption being disabled entirely. So
we need to choose the fastest option that gives us a solid margin of
security, and here that's XChaCha12. The best known attack on ChaCha
breaks only 7 rounds and has 2^235 time complexity, so ChaCha12's
security margin is still better than AES-256's. Much has been learned
about cryptanalysis of ARX ciphers since Salsa20 was originally designed
in 2005, and it now seems we can be comfortable with a smaller number of
rounds. The eSTREAM project also suggests the 12-round version of
Salsa20 as providing the best balance among the different variants:
combining very good performance with a "comfortable margin of security".
Note that it would be trivial to add vanilla ChaCha12 in addition to
XChaCha12. However, it's unneeded for now and therefore is omitted.
As discussed in the patch that introduced XChaCha20 support, I
considered splitting the code into separate chacha-common, chacha20,
xchacha20, and xchacha12 modules, so that these algorithms could be
enabled/disabled independently. However, since nearly all the code is
shared anyway, I ultimately decided there would have been little benefit
to the added complexity.
Reviewed-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>
Acked-by: Martin Willi <martin@strongswan.org>
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
In preparation for adding XChaCha12 support, rename/refactor
chacha20-generic to support different numbers of rounds. The
justification for needing XChaCha12 support is explained in more detail
in the patch "crypto: chacha - add XChaCha12 support".
The only difference between ChaCha{8,12,20} are the number of rounds
itself; all other parts of the algorithm are the same. Therefore,
remove the "20" from all definitions, structures, functions, files, etc.
that will be shared by all ChaCha versions.
Also make ->setkey() store the round count in the chacha_ctx (previously
chacha20_ctx). The generic code then passes the round count through to
chacha_block(). There will be a ->setkey() function for each explicitly
allowed round count; the encrypt/decrypt functions will be the same. I
decided not to do it the opposite way (same ->setkey() function for all
round counts, with different encrypt/decrypt functions) because that
would have required more boilerplate code in architecture-specific
implementations of ChaCha and XChaCha.
Reviewed-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>
Acked-by: Martin Willi <martin@strongswan.org>
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Eric Biggers