Lesson plan

Poly1305

Poly1305 is a universal hash family designed by Daniel J. Bernstein in 2002 for use in cryptography. As with any universal hash family, Poly1305 can be used as a one-time message authentication code to authenticate a single message using a secret key shared between sender and recipient, similar to the way that a one-time pad can be used to conceal the content of a single message using a secret key shared between sender and recipient. Originally Poly1305 was proposed as part of Poly1305-AES, a Carter–Wegman authenticator that combines the Poly1305 hash with AES-128 to authenticate many messages using a single short key and distinct message numbers. Poly1305 was later applied with a single-use key generated for each message using XSalsa20 in the NaCl crypto_secretbox_xsalsa20poly1305 authenticated cipher, and then using ChaCha in the ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated cipher deployed in TLS on the internet.

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Article summary

Poly1305 is a universal hash family designed by Daniel J. Bernstein in 2002 for use in cryptography. As with any universal hash family, Poly1305 can be used as a one-time message authentication code to authenticate a single message using a secret key shared between sender and recipient, similar to the way that a one-time pad can be used to conceal the content of a single message using a secret key shared between sender and recipient. Originally Poly1305 was proposed as part of Poly1305-AES, a Carter–Wegman authenticator that combines the Poly1305 hash with AES-128 to authenticate many messages using a single short key and distinct message numbers. Poly1305 was later applied with a single-use key generated for each message using XSalsa20 in the NaCl crypto_secretbox_xsalsa20poly1305 authenticated cipher, and then using ChaCha in the ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated cipher deployed in TLS on the internet.

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Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.