AES-GCM is a very common choice of authenticated encryption algorithm.
Unfortunately, it has some pretty low usage limits.
Using it with a large amount of messages requires extra care to ensure that nonces never repeat, and that keys are frequently rotated.
The TLS protocol hides that complexity, but applications using AES-GCM directly need to be aware of these limitations in order to use AES-GCM safely.
Ideally, nonces should be large, allowing applications to safely generate them randomly, with a negligible collision probability. But AES-GCM, as commonly implemented and required by IETF protocols, is limited to 96-bit (12 bytes) nonces, which is not enough to avoid collisions. AES-GCM keys are also expected to be replaced way before 2^32 messages have been encrypted.
During the 2023 NIST Workshop on Block Ciphers, Shay Gueron presented a clever way to overcome these limitations, and extend a key lifetime to "forever": the Derive-Key-AES-GCM construction.
This construction allows larger nonces to be used with AES-GCM, thus extending the key lifetime. With AES-256 and 192-bit nonces, a practically unlimited number of messages can be encrypted using a single key, and with nonces that can be randomly generated.
It significantly improves the safety of AES-GCM with minor overhead.
When instantiated with AES-128, the Derive-Key construction derives a fresh AES-128 encryption key from a key and a nonce that can be up to 120 bits (theorically 126, but 120 for practical purposes). That encryption key can then be used with AES-128-GCM, along with a static nonce.
When instantiated with AES-256, the Double-Nonce-Derive-Key construction derives a fresh AES-256 encryption key from a key and a nonce that can be up to 232 bits (but 192 is enough for all practical purposes). That encryption key can then be used with AES-128-GCM, along with a static nonce, and the guarantee that keys will never repeat.
This repository contains easy-to-use implementations of these constructions (aes256-gcm-dndk, aes128-gcm-dndk).