Showing papers on "Message authentication code published in 1985"

The subliminal channel and digital signatures

Abstract: In a paper entitled "The Prisoners' Problem and the Subliminal Channel" [1], the present author showed that a message authentication without secrecy channel providing m bits of overt communication and r bits of message authentication could be perverted to allow an l < r bit covert channel between the transmitter and a designated receiver at the expense of reducing the message authentication capability to r-l bits, without affecting the overt channel. It was also shown that under quite reasonable conditions the detection of even the existence of this covert channel could be made as difficult as the underlying cryptoalgorithm was difficult to "break." In view of this open -- but indetectable -- existence, the covert channel was called the "subliminal" channel. The examples constructed in [1], although adequate to prove the existence of such channels, did not appear to be feasible to extend to interesting communications systems. Fortunately, two digital signature schemes have been proposed since Crypto 83 -- one by Ong-Schnorr-Shamir [2] based on the difficulty of factoring sufficiently large composite numbers and one by Gamal [3] based on the difficulty of taking discrete logarithms with respect to a primitive element in a finite field -- that provide ideal bases for implementing practical subliminal channels. This paper reviews briefly the essential features of the subliminal channel and then discusses implementations in both the Ong-Schnorr-Shamir and Gamal digital signature channels.

Message authentication

Abstract: In the last chapter, we discussed the data integrity threats and the use of hashing technique to detect if any modification attacks have taken place on the data. Another type of threat that exist for data is the lack of message authentication. In this threat, the user is not sure about the originator of the message. Message authentication can be provided using the cryptographic techniques that use secret keys as done in case of encryption. Message Authentication Code MAC MAC algorithm is a symmetric key cryptographic technique to provide message authentication. For establishing MAC process, the sender and receiver share a symmetric key K. Essentially, a MAC is an encrypted checksum generated on the underlying message that is sent along with a message to ensure message authentication. The process of using MAC for authentication is depicted in the following illustration −

A message authenticator algorithm suitable for a mainframe computer

Abstract: Authenticators are widely used to protect payment messages againts active attack. They produce a number, sometimes called a ‘MAC’ which is a function of the whole message and a secrety key. the earlier name for them in banking was ‘test-key’, but this obsolescent term is confusing to cryptographers.