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by tptacek 3216 days ago
No, that's not accurate. EtM is an implementation technique. AEAD is a cryptographic primitive service model. The concepts aren't directly comparable.

In particular: you can easily end up with AE w/o AD by doing DIY ETM, and end up with serious exploitable bugs.

1 comments

Can you go into more detail? What are the common gotchas when implementing ETM yourself?
The classic example is not MAC'ing the IV.
Wait a minute, there are cases where this is required? Chacha20/Poly1305 is not one of them, right?

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Another I have personally seen was using the session key for a Wegman Carter hash (such as Poly1305). I received an email suggesting I do just that in Monocypher, to avoid using up the beginning of the key stream. Didn't realise why this would lead to instant key recovery.

I have since littered my manual with scary tales of total annihilation of security.