Paper 2025/2119

Twinkle: A family of Low-latency Schemes for Authenticated Encryption and Pointer Authentication

Tao Huang, Shield Lab, Huawei International Pte. Ltd., Singapore

Shuang Wu, Shield Lab, Huawei International Pte. Ltd., Singapore

Zilong Liu, HiSilicon Technologies Co. Ltd., China

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to explore the design of low-latency authenticated encryption schemes particularly for memory encryption, with a focus on the temporal uniqueness property. To achieve this, we present the low-latency Pseudo-Random Function (PRF) called $\mathtt{Twinkle}$ with an output up to 1152 bits. Leveraging only one block of $\texttt{Twinkle}$, we developed $\texttt{Twinkle-AE}$, a specialized authenticated encryption scheme with six variants covering different cache line sizes and security requirements. We also propose $\texttt{Twinkle-PA}$, a pointer authentication algorithm, which takes a 64-bit pointer and 64-bit context as input and outputs a tag of 1 to 32 bits. We conducted thorough security evaluations of both the PRFs and these schemes, examining their robustness against various common attacks. The results of our cryptanalysis indicate that these designs successfully achieve their targeted security objectives. Hardware implementations using the FreePDK45nm library show that $\texttt{Twinkle-AE}$ achieves an encryption and authentication latency of 3.83 $ns$ for a cache line. In comparison, $\texttt{AES}$-CTR with WC-MAC scheme and Ascon-128a achieve latencies of 9.78 $ns$ and 27.30 $ns$, respectively. For the pointer authentication scheme $\texttt{Twinkle-PA}$, the latency is 2.04 $ns$, while $\texttt{QARMA-64-}\sigma_0$ has a latency of 5.57 $ns$.

Note: We have revised the security claim and introduced two lightweight point authentication codes.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/2119,
      author = {Jianhua Wang and Tao Huang and Shuang Wu and Zilong Liu},
      title = {Twinkle: A family of Low-latency Schemes for  Authenticated Encryption and Pointer  Authentication},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/2119},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2119}
}