Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2006/433

Information Theoretic Bounds on Authentication Systems in Query Model

Reihaneh Safavi-Naini and Peter Wild

Abstract: Authentication codes provide message integrity guarantees in an information theoretic sense within a symmetric key setting. Information theoretic bounds on the success probability of an adversary who has access to previously authenticated messages have been derived by Simmons and Rosenbaum, among others. In this paper we consider a strong attack scenario where the adversary is adaptive and has access to authentication and verification oracles. We derive information theoretic bounds on the success probability of the adversary and on the key size of the code. This brings the study of unconditionally secure authentication systems on a par with the study of computationally secure ones. We characterize the codes that meet these bounds and compare our result with the earlier ones.

Category / Keywords: foundations / information theory, message authentication, authentication codes

Date: received 20 Nov 2006

Contact author: rei at uow edu au

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Version: 20061121:122558 (All versions of this report)

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