Flexible and Efficient Message Authentication in Hardware and Software

We present the Galois Message Authentication Code (GMAC), a generic construction based on universal hashing using multiplication in the finite field GF(2^128). We also present GCM, a block cipher mode of operation that provides both encryption and message integrity in a single primitive, and is based on GMAC. The inherent parallelism in our constructs enable hardware implementations to achieve speeds greater than 10 gigabits per second, while requiring significantly less area than other constructions. Software implementations also have excellent performance characteristics. GMAC accepts nonces of arbitrary length..