UNIT III

MAC, HASH & Digital Signatures

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At cats' green on the Sunday he took the message from the
inside of the pillar and added Peter Moran's name to the two
names already printed there in the "Brontosaur" code. The
message now read: “Leviathan to Dragon: Martin Hillman,
Trevor Allan, Peter Moran: observe and tail.” What was the good
of it John hardly knew. He felt better, he felt that at last he had
made an attack on Peter Moran instead of waiting passively and
effecting no retaliation. Besides, what was the use of being in
possession of the key to the codes if he never took advantage of
it?

—Talking to Strange Men, Ruth Rendell

 Message Authentication
• message authentication is concerned with:
– protecting the integrity of a message
– validating identity of originator
– non-repudiation of origin (dispute resolution)
• will consider the security requirements
• then three alternative functions used:
– message encryption
– message authentication code (MAC)
– hash function
 Security Requirements
• Disclosure
• Traffic analysis
• Masquerade
• Content Modification
• Sequence Modification
• Timing Modification
• Source Repudiation
• Destination Repudiation
 Message Encryption
• message encryption by itself also provides a
measure of authentication
• if symmetric encryption is used then:
– receiver know sender must have created it
– since only sender and receiver now key used
– know content cannot of been altered
– if message has suitable structure, redundancy or a
checksum to detect any changes
 Message Encryption
• if public-key encryption is used:
– encryption provides no confidence of sender
– since anyone potentially knows public-key
– however if
• sender signs message using their private-key
• then encrypts with recipients public key
• have both secrecy and authentication
– again need to recognize corrupted messages
– but at cost of two public-key uses on message
 Hash Functions
• condenses arbitrary message to fixed size
h = H(M)
• usually assume that the hash function is
public and not keyed
– cf. MAC which is keyed
• hash used to detect changes to message
• can use in various ways with message
• most often to create a digital signature
 Requirements for Hash Functions
1. can be applied to any sized message M
2. produces fixed-length output h
3. is easy to compute h=H(M) for any message M
4. given h is infeasible to find x s.t. H(x)=h
• one-way property
5. given x is infeasible to find y s.t. H(y)=H(x)
• weak collision resistance
6. is infeasible to find any x,y s.t. H(y)=H(x)
• strong collision resistance
 Simple Hash Functions
• are several proposals for simple functions
• based on XOR of message blocks
• not secure since can manipulate any message
and either not change hash or change hash
also
• need a stronger cryptographic function (next
chapter)
 Message Authentication Code (MAC)
• generated by an algorithm that creates a small
fixed-sized block
– depending on both message and some key
– like encryption though need not be reversible
• appended to message as a signature
• receiver performs same computation on
message and checks it matches the MAC
• provides assurance that message is unaltered
and comes from sender
Message Authentication Code
 Message Authentication Codes
• as shown the MAC provides authentication
• can also use encryption for secrecy
– generally use separate keys for each
– can compute MAC either before or after encryption
– is generally regarded as better done before
• why use a MAC?
– sometimes only authentication is needed
– sometimes need authentication to persist longer than the
encryption (eg. archival use)
• note that a MAC is not a digital signature
 MAC Properties
• a MAC is a cryptographic checksum
MAC = CK(M)
– condenses a variable-length message M
– using a secret key K
– to a fixed-sized authenticator
• is a many-to-one function
– potentially many messages have same MAC
– but finding these needs to be very difficult
 Requirements for MACs
• taking into account the types of attacks
• need the MAC to satisfy the following:
1. knowing a message and MAC, is infeasible to
find another message with same MAC
2. MACs should be uniformly distributed
3. MAC should depend equally on all bits of the
message
 Using Symmetric Ciphers for MACs
• can use any block cipher chaining mode and
use final block as a MAC
• Data Authentication Algorithm (DAA) is a
widely used MAC based on DES-CBC
– using IV=0 and zero-pad of final block
– encrypt message using DES in CBC mode
– and send just the final block as the MAC
• or the leftmost M bits (16≤M≤64) of final block
• but final MAC is now too small for security
Data Authentication Algorithm
Hash Functions & Digital Signatures
 Birthday Attacks
• might think a 64-bit hash is secure
• but by Birthday Paradox is not
• birthday attack works thus:
m
– opponent generates 2 /2 variations of a valid message all
with essentially the same meaning
m
– opponent also generates 2 /2 variations of a desired
fraudulent message
– two sets of messages are compared to find pair with same
hash (probability > 0.5 by birthday paradox)
– have user sign the valid message, then substitute the
forgery which will have a valid signature
• conclusion is that need to use larger MAC/hash
 Block Ciphers as Hash Functions
• can use block ciphers as hash functions
– using H0=0 and zero-pad of final block
– compute: Hi = EMi [Hi-1]
– and use final block as the hash value
– similar to CBC but without a key
• resulting hash is too small (64-bit)
– both due to direct birthday attack
– and to “meet-in-the-middle” attack
• other variants also susceptible to attack
 Hash Functions & MAC Security
• like block ciphers have:
• brute-force attacks exploiting
m/
– strong collision resistance hash have cost 2 2
• have proposal for h/w MD5 cracker
• 128-bit hash looks vulnerable, 160-bits better
– MACs with known message-MAC pairs
• can either attack keyspace (cf key search) or MAC
• at least 128-bit MAC is needed for security
 Hash Functions & MAC Security
• cryptanalytic attacks exploit structure
– like block ciphers want brute-force attacks to be the best
alternative
• have a number of analytic attacks on iterated hash
functions
– CVi = f[CVi-1, Mi]; H(M)=CVN
– typically focus on collisions in function f
– like block ciphers is often composed of rounds
– attacks exploit properties of round functions
 Summary
• have considered:
– message authentication using
– message encryption
– hash functions
– hash functions
– MACs
– general approach & security