Abstract:
In the modified CTR (Counter) mode known as CTR2, nonces are encrypted before constructing sequences of counters from them. This way we have only probabilistic guarantees for non-overlapping of the sequences. We show that these guarantees, and therefore the security guarantees of CTR2, are strong enough in two standard scenarios: random nonces and non-repeating nonces. We also show how to extend CTR2 to an authenticated encryption mode which we call CHE (Counter-Hash-Encrypt). To extend, we use one invocation of polynomial hashing and one additional block encryption.