Hash chain

About: Hash chain is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3360 publications have been published within this topic receiving 84795 citations.

HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication

Abstract: This document describes HMAC, a mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions. HMAC can be used with any iterative cryptographic hash function, e.g., MD5, SHA-1, in combination with a secret shared key. The cryptographic strength of HMAC depends on the properties of the underlying hash function.

Keying Hash Functions for Message Authentication

Abstract: The use of cryptographic hash functions like MD5 or SHA-1 for message authentication has become a standard approach in many applications, particularly Internet security protocols. Though very easy to implement, these mechanisms are usually based on ad hoc techniques that lack a sound security analysis. We present new, simple, and practical constructions of message authentication schemes based on a cryptographic hash function. Our schemes, NMAC and HMAC, are proven to be secure as long as the underlying hash function has some reasonable cryptographic strengths. Moreover we show, in a quantitative way, that the schemes retain almost all the security of the underlying hash function. The performance of our schemes is essentially that of the underlying hash function. Moreover they use the hash function (or its compression function) as a black box, so that widely available library code or hardwair can be used to implement them in a simple way, and replaceability of the underlying hash function is easily supported.

A fuzzy commitment scheme

Abstract: We combine well-known techniques from the areas of error-correcting codes and cryptography to achieve a new type of cryptographic primitive that we refer to as a fuzzy commitment scheme. Like a conventional cryptographic commitment scheme, our fuzzy commitment scheme is both concealing and binding: it is infeasible for an attacker to learn the committed value, and also for the committer to decommit a value in more than one way. In a conventional scheme, a commitment must be opened using a unique witness, which acts, essentially, as a decryption key. By contrast, our scheme is fuzzy in the sense that it accepts a witness that is close to the original encrypting witness in a suitable metric, but not necessarily identical.This characteristic of our fuzzy commitment scheme makes it useful for applications such as biometric authentication systems, in which data is subject to random noise. Because the scheme is tolerant of error, it is capable of protecting biometric data just as conventional cryptographic techniques, like hash functions, are used to protect alphanumeric passwords. This addresses a major outstanding problem in the theory of biometric authentication. We prove the security characteristics of our fuzzy commitment scheme relative to the properties of an underlying cryptographic hash function.