Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Message authentication code
Summary
In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as an authentication tag, is a short piece of information used for authenticating a message. In other words, to confirm that the message came from the stated sender (its authenticity) and has not been changed. The MAC value protects a message's data integrity, as well as its authenticity, by allowing verifiers (who also possess the secret key) to detect any changes to the message content.
The term message integrity code (MIC) is frequently substituted for the term MAC, especially in communications to distinguish it from the use of the latter as media access control address (MAC address). However, some authors use MIC to refer to a message digest, which aims only to uniquely but opaquely identify a single message. RFC 4949 recommends avoiding the term message integrity code (MIC), and instead using checksum, error detection code, hash, keyed hash, message authentication code, or protected checksum.
Informally, a message authentication code system consists of three algorithms:
A key generation algorithm selects a key from the key space uniformly at random.
A signing algorithm efficiently returns a tag given the key and the message.
A verifying algorithm efficiently verifies the authenticity of the message given the same key and the tag. That is, return accepted when the message and tag are not tampered with or forged, and otherwise return rejected.
A secure message authentication code must resist attempts by an adversary to forge tags, for arbitrary, select, or all messages, including under conditions of known- or chosen-message. It should be computationally infeasible to compute a valid tag of the given message without knowledge of the key, even if for the worst case, we assume the adversary knows the tag of any message but the one in question.
Formally, a message authentication code (MAC) system is a triple of efficient algorithms (G, S, V) satisfying:
G (key-generator) gives the key k on input 1n, where n is the security parameter.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related units (1)
Related concepts (18)
Cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from κρυπτός "hidden, secret"; and γράφειν graphein, "to write", or -λογία -logia, "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others.
HMAC
In cryptography, an HMAC (sometimes expanded as either keyed-hash message authentication code or hash-based message authentication code) is a specific type of message authentication code (MAC) involving a cryptographic hash function and a secret cryptographic key. As with any MAC, it may be used to simultaneously verify both the data integrity and authenticity of a message. HMAC can provide authentication using a shared secret instead of using digital signatures with asymmetric cryptography.
Cyclic redundancy check
A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is an error-detecting code commonly used in digital networks and storage devices to detect accidental changes to digital data. Blocks of data entering these systems get a short check value attached, based on the remainder of a polynomial division of their contents. On retrieval, the calculation is repeated and, in the event the check values do not match, corrective action can be taken against data corruption. CRCs can be used for error correction (see bitfilters).