Authenticated Encryption (AEAD) Reference
Reference for AEAD ciphers that provide both confidentiality and integrity, including GCM, CCM, and ChaCha20-Poly1305.
AEAD Principles
Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) simultaneously provides confidentiality for plaintext and authenticity for both ciphertext and associated data. The nonce must be unique per encryption under the same key but need not be secret. AEAD schemes prevent tampering and reorder attacks that plain encryption cannot detect. Modern protocols mandate AEAD over separate encrypt-then-MAC.
- confidentiality
- Plaintext hidden from attackers
- integrity
- Ciphertext tampering detected
- associated data
- Authenticated but not encrypted
IND-CPAINT-CTXTheaders, AADCommon Schemes
AES-GCM is the most widely deployed AEAD, offering hardware acceleration and parallelizable authentication. ChaCha20-Poly1305 is preferred in software-only environments for constant-time execution. AES-CCM is used in wireless protocols like 802.11i and Bluetooth. The nonce management strategy is critical: counters are preferred over random nonces to avoid collision risk.
- AES-GCM
- Parallel, HW-accelerated
- ChaCha20-Poly1305
- Constant-time software
- AES-CCM
- Combines CTR+CBC-MAC
TLS defaultRFC 8439wireless