[Cryptech Tech] FW: [Ace] chacha20 as prng

[Joachim Strömbergson]

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Aloha!

Cuellar, Jorge wrote:
> Leif Johanson provided to us the link, in the hope that you could 
> share with us information about the use of ChaCha20 (and related 
> mechanisms) as pseudo-random generators.
> 
> I would be interested in promoting ChaCha20 as a building block for 
> the "Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments 
> (ACE)", and any pointers/publications/performance-numbers that you 
> could share with us.  Perhaps later for im
> 
> Best regards, Jorge

Cool, sure.

To put it simply, we use chacha20 as the csprng by having it encipher
512-bit blocks of a message of up to CIPHER_MAX_BLOCKS (which is hard
coded to be 0x100000000. After this number of blocks we will always
reseed. Reseed frequency can be set by the application. The default
value is 0x1000000. (CIPHER_MAX_BLOCKS is thus a failsafe.)

We seed Chacha20 with:

- - 256 bit key
- - 64 bit iv
- - 64 bit initial counter value
- - 512 bit message block

The number of rounds are settable and the default value is 20 rounds to
match the ChaCha20 specification for 256 bit strength.

Reseed values comes from the mixer. The mixer is implemented with
SHA-512 and 512-bit reseed words are basically the digest output from
SHA-512. The digests are generated by incrementally hashing data from
the entropy providers. This means that for a single 512-bit seed we
consume 1024 bit entropy. And the seed is based on these entropy bits
and the current state of sha-512. Reseeding the csprng consumes 2048
bits of entropy.


- -- 
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours

Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning.
========================================================================
 Joachim Strömbergson          Secworks AB          joachim at secworks.se
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