Artificial-Noise-Aided Message Authentication Codes with Information-Theoretic Security

TL;DR

This paper introduces artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs) that combine information-theoretic and computational security, resisting key recovery even against unlimited computational power, and provides a practical analysis framework.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cryptographic primitive, ANA-MACs, integrating artificial noise with MACs to achieve dual security guarantees and offers a balanced performance analysis method.

Findings

ANA-MACs resist key recovery attacks with unlimited computing power.

Artificial noise effectively interferes with traditional MACs to enhance security.

The analysis framework balances error rates, false acceptance, and key equivocation.

Abstract

In the past, two main approaches for the purpose of authentication, including information-theoretic authentication codes and complexity-theoretic message authentication codes (MACs), were almost independently developed. In this paper, we propose a new cryptographic primitive, namely, artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs), which can be considered as both computationally secure and information-theoretically secure. For ANA-MACs, we introduce artificial noise to interfere with the complexity-theoretic MACs and quantization is further employed to facilitate packet-based transmission. With a channel coding formulation of key recovery in the MACs, the generation of standard authentication tags can be seen as an encoding process for the ensemble of codes, where the shared key between Alice and Bob is considered as the input and the message is used to specify a code from the ensemble of codes. Then, we show that the introduction of artificial noise in ANA-MACs can be well employed to resist the key recovery attack even if the opponent has an unlimited computing power. Finally, a pragmatic approach for the analysis of ANA-MACs is provided, and we show how to balance the three performance metrics, including the completeness error, the false acceptance probability, and the conditional equivocation about the key. The analysis can be well applied to a class of ANA-MACs, where MACs with Rijndael cipher are employed.