International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

Tight Bounds for Unconditional Authentication Protocols in the Manual Channel and Shared Key Models

Authors:
Moni Naor
Gil Segev
Adam Smith
Download:
URL: http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/175
Search ePrint
Search Google
Abstract: We address the message authentication problem in two seemingly different communication models. In the first model, the sender and receiver are connected by an insecure channel and by a low-bandwidth auxiliary channel, that enables the sender to ``manually'' authenticate one short message to the receiver (for example, by typing a short string or comparing two short strings). We consider this model in a setting where no computational assumptions are made, and prove that for any $0 < \epsilon < 1$ there exists a $\log^* n$-round protocol for authenticating $n$-bit messages, in which only $2 \log(1 / \epsilon) + O(1)$ bits are manually authenticated, and any adversary (even computationally unbounded) has probability of at most $\epsilon$ to cheat the receiver into accepting a fraudulent message. Moreover, we develop a proof technique showing that our protocol is essentially optimal by providing a lower bound of $2 \log(1 / \epsilon) - O(1)$ on the required length of the manually authenticated string. The second model we consider is the traditional message authentication model. In this model the sender and the receiver share a short secret key; however, they are connected only by an insecure channel. We apply the proof technique above to obtain a lower bound of $2 \log(1 / \epsilon) - 2$ on the required Shannon entropy of the shared key. This settles an open question posed by Gemmell and Naor (CRYPTO '93). Finally, we prove that one-way functions are {\em necessary} (and sufficient) for the existence of protocols breaking the above lower bounds in the computational setting.
BibTeX
@misc{eprint-2006-21668,
  title={Tight Bounds for Unconditional Authentication Protocols in the Manual Channel and Shared Key Models},
  booktitle={IACR Eprint archive},
  keywords={cryptographic protocols / authentication, lower bounds, one-way functions, unconditional security},
  url={http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/175},
  note={Preliminary version in CRYPTO '06. Full version in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (special issue on Information-Theoretic Security). gil.segev@weizmann.ac.il 14063 received 18 May 2006, last revised 3 Jul 2008},
  author={Moni Naor and Gil Segev and Adam Smith},
  year=2006
}