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Fast and Secure CBC Type MAC Algorithms

Published

Author(s)

Mridul Nandi

Abstract

The CBC-MAC, or cipher block chaining message authentication code, is a well-known method to generate message authentication codes. Unfortunately, it is not forgery-secure over an arbitrary domain. There are several secure variants of CBC-MAC, among which OMAC (or one-key CBC-MAC) is a widely-used candidate. A simple variant of it, called CMAC, also has been recommended by NIST and is also used widely. Both OAMC and CMAC cost (s+1) blockcipher invocations to authenticate an s-block message, and it takes only one blockcipher key. In this paper we propose two secure and efficient variants of CBC-MAC. Our constructions cost only s block cipher encryptions to authenticate an s-block message, for all s >= 2. Moreover, GCBC2 needs only one block cipher encryption for almost all single block messages, and for all other single block messages, it costs two block cipher encryptions. We have also defined a class of generalized CBC-MAC constructions, and proved a sufficient condition for prf-security. In particular, we have provided an unified prf-security analysis of CBC-type constructions, e.g., XCBC, TMAC and our proposals GCBC1 and GCBC2.
Proceedings Title
Fast Software Encryption (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Volume
5665
Conference Dates
February 22-25, 2009
Conference Location
Leuven
Conference Title
16th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption (FSE 2009)

Keywords

CBC-MAC, OMAC, padding rule, prf-security

Citation

Nandi, M. (2009), Fast and Secure CBC Type MAC Algorithms, Fast Software Encryption (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Leuven, -1, [online], https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03317-9_23 (Accessed October 16, 2025)

Issues

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Created July 21, 2009, Updated November 10, 2018
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