*It can be interesting to get into the tall weeds of professional crypto, and there are so many Android devices around that this could become the most popular form of encryption in the world in short order.
*They also quote the Victorian flower code, which is rather endearing.
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To solve this problem, we have designed a new encryption mode called Adiantum. Adiantum allows us to use the ChaCha stream cipher in a length-preserving mode, by adapting ideas from AES-based proposals for length-preserving encryption such as HCTR and HCH. On ARM Cortex-A7, Adiantum encryption and decryption on 4096-byte sectors is about 10.6 cycles per byte, around 5x faster than AES-256-XTS.
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Even though Adiantum is very new, we are in a position to have high confidence in its security. In our paper, we prove that it has good security properties, under the assumption that ChaCha12 and AES-256 are secure. This is standard practice in cryptography; from "primitives" like ChaCha and AES, we build "constructions" like XTS, GCM, or Adiantum. Very often we can offer strong arguments but not a proof that the primitives are secure, while we can prove that if the primitives are secure, the constructions we build from them are too. We don't have to make assumptions about NH or the Poly1305 hash function; these are proven to have the cryptographic property ("ε-almost-∆-universality") we rely on.
Adiantum is named after the genus of the maidenhair fern, which in the Victorian language of flowers (floriography) represents sincerity and discretion.
Additional resources
The full details of our design, and the proof of security, are in our paper Adiantum: length-preserving encryption for entry-level processors in IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology; this will be presented at the Fast Software Encryption conference (FSE 2019) in March....
