[Resource Topic] 2013/126: Direct Proof of Security of Wegman-Carter Authentication with Partially Known Key

Welcome to the resource topic for 2013/126

Title:
Direct Proof of Security of Wegman-Carter Authentication with Partially Known Key

Authors: Aysajan Abidin, Jan-Åke Larsson

Abstract:

Information-theoretically secure (ITS) authentication is needed in Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). In this paper, we study security of an ITS authentication scheme proposed by Wegman&Carter, in the case of partially known authentication key. This scheme uses a new authentication key in each authentication attempt, to select a hash function from an Almost Strongly Universal$_2$ hash function family. The partial knowledge of the attacker is measured as the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform distribution; this is the usual measure in QKD. We provide direct proofs of security of the scheme, when using partially known key, first in the information-theoretic setting and then in terms of witness indistinguishability as used in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We find that if the authentication procedure has a failure probability \epsilon and the authentication key has an \epsilon' trace distance to the uniform, then under ITS, the adversary’s success probability conditioned on an authentic message-tag pair is only bounded by \epsilon+|\mT|\epsilon', where |\mT| is the size of the set of tags. Furthermore, the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform increases to |\mT|\epsilon' after having seen an authentic message-tag pair. Despite this, we are able to prove directly that the authenticated channel is indistinguishable from an (ideal) authentic channel (the desired functionality), except with probability less than \epsilon+\epsilon'. This proves that the scheme is (\epsilon+\epsilon')-UC-secure, without using the composability theorem.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/126

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