## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2004/319

Badger - A Fast and Provably Secure MAC

Martin Boesgaard and Ove Scavenius and Thomas Pedersen and Thomas Christensen and Erik Zenner

Abstract: We present Badger, a new fast and provably secure MAC based on universal hashing. In the construction, a modified tree hash that is more efficient than standard tree hash is used and its security is being proven. Furthermore, in order to derive the core hash function of the tree, we use a novel technique for reducing $\Delta$-universal function families to universal families. The resulting MAC is very efficient on standard platforms both for short and long messages. As an example, for a $64$-bit tag, it achieves performances up to 2.2 and 1.2 clock cycles per byte on a Pentium III and Pentium 4 processor, respectively. The forgery probability is at most $2^{-52.2}$.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / message authentication codes, universal hash, tree, pseudo-random generator

Publication Info: ACNS 2005 (Springer LNCS)

Date: received 19 Nov 2004, last revised 2 Sep 2005

Contact author: ez at cryptico com

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: This paper is a slightly extended version of that presented at ACNS 2005.

Short URL: ia.cr/2004/319

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