NSF-BSF: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Building the Next Generation of Authenticated Encryption

Authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) is by now the standard way in which computing systems use cryptography to protect data. As such, secure and high-performance AEAD is critical to protecting society's digital infrastructure. Recent work has shown how the AEAD design paradigms underlying our mostly widely used encryption schemes are vulnerable to attacks in important applications. Widely used schemes also do not provide the performance required of modern large-scale cloud services. There is now widespread agreement that the technology industry needs a new generation of AEAD schemes, to ensure the security of our digital systems in the coming decades. In this project, the team of researchers will pursue a research agenda aimed at laying foundations for the next generation of AEAD schemes. It will generate new, foundational theory to yield principled AEAD design paradigms that will rectify the security issues and performance limitations of current schemes. Doing so will involve new measurement studies, articulation of flexible AEAD as a design goal, new techniques for building schemes, and new deployment patterns realized via public, open-source libraries. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.