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

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 consider to construct new MACs, which are both computationally secure and information-theoretically secure. Essentially, we propose a new cryptographic primitive, namely, artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs), where artificial noise is used 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 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.