Message authentication with one-way hash functions

Abstract

Fast message integrity and authentication services are much desired in today's high-speed network protocols. Current message authentication techniques are mostly encryption-based which is undesirable for several reasons. In this brief paper, we introduce encryption-free message authentication based entirely on fast one-way hash functions. Two methods are presented and their strength is analyzed. The security of the proposed methods is based on the strength of the underlying one-way hash function.