A New Stand-Alone MAC Construct Called SMAC

This paper presents a new efficient stand-alone MAC scheme based on the processing in the FSM part of the stream cipher family SNOW, which in turn uses the AES round function. The proposal offers a combination of very high speed in software and hardware, a truncatable tag and resistance to nonce misuse. Three concrete versions of SMAC are proposed with different security levels.

Research paper

#Security #MAC #SNOW #AES

SMAC can also be directly integrated with an external ciphering engine in an AEAD mode. Every design decision is thoroughly justified and supported by the results of our cryptanalysis and simulations. Additionally, we introduce an aggregated mode version, SMAC-1×n, in which software performance reaches up to 925 Gbps (around 0.038 cycles per byte) for long messages in a single thread. To the best of our knowledge, SMAC achieves a record-breaking software performance compared to all known MAC engines.

Authors

Dachao Wang, Dept. of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden
Alexander Maximov and Patrik Ekdahl, Ericsson Research, Sweden
Thomas Johansson, Dept. of Electrical and Information Technology, Lund University, Sweden

Published in IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, ISSN 2519-173X, Vol. 2025, No. 1

DOI:10.46586/tosc.v2025.i1.5-43

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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A New Stand-Alone MAC Construct Called SMAC

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