Abstract
HMAC is the internet standard for message authentication [BCK96],[KBC97]. What distinguishes HMAC from otherMAC algorithms is that it provides proofs of security assuming that the underlying cryptographic hash (e.g. SHA-1) has some reasonable properties. HMAC is efficient for long messages, however, for short messages the nested constructions results in a significant inefficiency. For example to MAC a message shorter than a block, HMAC requires at least two calls to the compression function rather than one.
This inefficiency may be particularly high for some applications, like message authentication of signaling messages, where the individual messages may all fit within one or two blocks. Also for TCP/IP trafic it is well known that a large number of packets (e.g. acknowledgement) have sizes around 40 bytes which fit within a block of most cryptographic hashes. We propose an enhancement that allows both short and long messages to be message authenticated more efficiently than HMAC while also providing proofs of security. In particular, for a message smaller than a block our MAC only requires one call to the compression function.
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Patel, S. (2003). An Efficient MAC for Short Messages. In: Nyberg, K., Heys, H. (eds) Selected Areas in Cryptography. SAC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2595. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36492-7_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36492-7_23
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