I'm not sure I understand. In OCB (or any other AEAD) there is a single MAC for the entire ciphertext. You can't decrypt&verify large data in a single pass.

You are completely right that for some constructions (such as ChaCha20-Poly1305, AES-CCM, and possible AES-GCM) there is only a single MAC for the entire ciphertext.

However that is not true for other constructions. AES-OCB is a single-pass cipher that has a MAC for each block (this is actually the main selling feature of OCB). (AES-EAX also has a MAC for each block too, but is two-pass.)

Also, STREAM/CHAIN are also AEAD, so your generalisation can't be always true.

I don't see it. From https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7253.txt :

Function name: OCB-ENCRYPT Input: K, string of KEYLEN bits // Key N, string of no more than 120 bits // Nonce A, string of any length // Associated data P, string of any length // Plaintext Output: C, string of length bitlen(P) + TAGLEN bits // Ciphertext

Only a single tag, exactly like CCM and GCM. Am I missing something?

It depends on what you call "AEAD", of course. For me it's something that generates a single MAC. STREAM/CHAIN can then be used with an underlying AEAD (GCM, CCM, OCB, SIV) to create a "streaming AEAD" that generates multiple chunks, each one of them with a MAC.

I'll be honest, I was going off the Wikipedia description of the algorithm.

But looking at the RFC you're right that there's only one authentication tag (I also looked at the GPG implementation as well as the proposed OpenPGP RFC for AEAD -- and it looks like they implement chunking on top of OCB/EAX/GCM for this reason). I stand corrected.