Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++

Chapter 6. Hashes and Message Authentication

In Chapter 5, we discussed primitives for symmetric encryption. Some of those primitives were capable of providing two of the most important security goals: secrecy and message integrity. There are occasions where secrecy may not be important in the slightest, but you’d still like to ensure that messages are not modified as they go over the Internet. In such cases, you can use a symmetric primitive such as CWC mode, which allows you to authenticate data without encrypting any of it. Alternatively, you can consider using a standalone message authentication code (MAC).

This chapter focuses on MACs, and it also covers two types of one-way hash functions: cryptographic hash functions and “universal” hash functions. Cryptographic hash functions are used in public key cryptography and are a popular component to use in a MAC (you can also use block ciphers), but universal hash functions turn out to be a much better foundation for a secure MAC.

Warning

Many of the recipes in this chapter are too low-level for general-purpose use. We recommend that you first try to find what you need in Chapter 9; the recipes there are more generally applicable. If you do use these recipes, please be careful, read all our warnings, and consider using the higher-level constructs we suggest.