PAEQ: Parallelizable Permutation-Based Authenticated Encryption

We propose a new authenticated encryption scheme PAEQ, which employs a fixed public permutation. In contrast to the recent sponge-based proposals, our scheme is fully parallelizable. It also allows flexible key and nonce length, and is one of the few which achieves 128-bit security for both confidentiality and data authenticity with the same key length.

The permutation within PAEQ is a new design called AESQ, which is based on AES and is 512 bits wide. In contrast to similar constructions used in the SHA-3 competition, our permutation fully benefits from the newest Intel AES instructions and runs at 2.5 cycles per byte if used as the counter-mode PRF.