Cryptography and Network

Security
Chapter 11
Fourth Edition
by William Stallings
 Chapter 11 – Message Authentication
and Hash Functions

 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
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
 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
Hash Functions & Digital Signatures
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)
Birthday Attacks
 might think a 64-bit hash is secure
 but by Birthday Paradox is not
 birthday attack works thus:
 opponent generates 2m/2 variations of a valid
message all with essentially the same meaning
 opponent also generates 2m/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
 strong collision resistance hash have cost
2m/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
 MACs
 hash functions
 general approach & security