Abstract
One of the most pervasive problems in military and in commercial communications-like systems is the need to authenticate digital messages; where authentication is interpreted broadly to mean verification both that a message was originated by the purported transmitter and that it has not been altered subsequently, which includes verifying that it is not a repetition of an earlier legitimate but already accepted message. The terminology ttmessagetl is a carryover from the origins of the problem in communications systems, but as used here includes resident computer software, data bank information, access requests and passes or passwords, hand-shaking exchanges between terminals and central facilities or between card readers and teller machines, etc.; i.e., digital information exchange over a suspect channel or interface in general. The need to authenticate information presupposes an opponent(s) — who may in some circumstances be either the transmitter or receiver — that desires to have unauthentic messages be accepted by the receiver, or by arbiters, as authentic or else to fraudulently attribute to the transmitter messages that he did not send.
This work performed at Sandia National Laboratories supported by the U. S. Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC04-76DP00789.
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References
G. J. Simmons, “Message Authentication: A Game on Hypergraphs,” Proceedings of the 15th Southeastern Conference on Combinatories, Graph Theory and Computing, Baton Rouge, LA, March 5–8, 1984, pp. 161–192.
G. J. Simmons, “Authentication Theory/Coding Theory,” Proceedings of Crypto’84, Santa Barbara, CA, August 19–22, 1984, in Advances in Cryptology, Ed. by R. Blakley, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1985), to appear.
G. J. Simmons, “Message Authentication Without Secrecy,” in Secure Communications and Asymmetric Cryptosystems, ed. by G. J. Simmons, AAAS Selected Symposia Series, Westview Press, Boulder, CO (1982), pp. 105–139.
Data Encryption Standard, FIPS, Pub. 46, National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C., January 1977.
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Simmons, G.J. (1986). The Practice of Authentication. In: Pichler, F. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT’ 85. EUROCRYPT 1985. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 219. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39805-8_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-39805-8_31
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