# Direct proof of security of Wegman–Carter authentication with partially known key

Direct proof of security of Wegman–Carter authentication with partially known key 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 $$_2$$ 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 $$\varepsilon$$ ε and the authentication key has an $$\varepsilon ^{\prime }$$ ε ′ trace distance to the uniform, then under ITS, the adversary’s success probability conditioned on an authentic message-tag pair is only bounded by $$\varepsilon +|\mathcal T |\varepsilon ^{\prime }$$ ε + | T | ε ′ , where $$|\mathcal T |$$ | T | is the size of the set of tags. Furthermore, the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform increases to $$|\mathcal T |\varepsilon ^{\prime }$$ | T | ε ′ 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 $$\varepsilon +\varepsilon ^{\prime }$$ ε + ε ′ . This proves that the scheme is ( $$\varepsilon +\varepsilon ^{\prime }$$ ε + ε ′ )-UC-secure, without using the composability theorem. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Quantum Information Processing Springer Journals

# Direct proof of security of Wegman–Carter authentication with partially known key

, Volume 13 (10) – Sep 20, 2013
16 pages

/lp/springer_journal/direct-proof-of-security-of-wegman-carter-authentication-with-iC2JiQtZRi
Publisher
Springer US
Subject
Physics; Quantum Information Technology, Spintronics; Quantum Computing; Data Structures, Cryptology and Information Theory; Quantum Physics; Mathematical Physics
ISSN
1570-0755
eISSN
1573-1332
D.O.I.
10.1007/s11128-013-0641-6
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

### References

• Universal classes of hash functions
Carter, L; Wegman, MN
• Security aspects of the authentication used in quantum cryptography

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