6.9.1 Problem You want to provide integrity for messages in such a way that people with a secret key can verify that the message has not changed since the integrity value (often called a tag) was first calculated. 6.9.2 Solution Use a message integrity check. As with hash functions, there are somewhat standard interfaces, particularly an incremental interface. 6.9.3 Discussion Libraries that support MACs tend to support incremental operation using a standard structure, very similar to that used by hash functions: Allocate and key a context object. The context object holds the internal state of the MAC until data processing is complete. The type of the context object can be specific to the MAC, or there can be a single type that works for all hash functions in a library. OpenSSL supports only one MAC and has only the associated context type. The key can be reused numerous times without reallocating. Often, you will need to specify the underlying algorithm you are using for your MAC. Reset the context object, setting the internal parameters of the MAC to their initial state so that another message's authentication tag can be calculated. Many MACs accept a nonce, and this is where you would pass that in. This is often combined with the "init" call when the algorithm does not take a nonce, such as with OMAC and HMAC. "Update" the context object by passing in data to be authenticated and the associated length of that input. The results of the MAC'ing process will be dependent on the order of the data that you pass, but you can pass in all the partial data you wish. That is, calling the update routine with the strings "he" then "llo" would produce the same results as calling it once with the string "hello". The update function generally takes as arguments the context object, the data to process, and the associated length of that data. "Finalize" the context object and produce the authentication tag. Most APIs will generally take as arguments the context object and a buffer into which the message digest is placed.
Often, you may have a block cipher or a hash function that you'd like to turn into a MAC, but no associated code comes with the cryptographic primitive. Alternately, you might use a library such as OpenSSL or CryptoAPI that provides very narrow choices. For this reason, the next several recipes provide implementations of MACs we recommend for general-purpose use, particularly OMAC, CMAC, and HMAC. Security Recommendations for MACs MACs are not quite as low-level as cryptographic hash functions. Yet they are still fairly low-level constructs, and there are some common pitfalls associated with them. We discuss these elsewhere in the book, but here's a summary of steps you should take to defend yourself against common problems: Don't use the same MAC key as an encryption key. If you'd like to have a system with a single key, key your MAC and encryption separately, using the technique from Recipe 4.11. Use a securely generated, randomly chosen key for your MAC, not something hardcoded or otherwise predictable! Be sure to read Recipe 6.18 on how to use a MAC and encryption together securely, as it can be difficult to do. Use an always-increasing nonce, and use this to actively thwart capture replay attacks. Do this even if the MAC doesn't have built-in support for nonces. (See Recipe 6.21 for information on how to thwart capture replay attacks, and Recipe 6.12 for using a nonce with MACs that don't have direct support for them.) It is of vital importance that any parties computing a MAC agree on exactly what data is to be processed. To that end, it pays to get very detailed in specifying the content of messages, including any fields you have and how they are encoded before the MAC is computed. Any encoding should be unambiguous.
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Some MAC interfaces may not remove key material from memory when done. Be sure to check the particular implementation you're using. OpenSSL provides only a single MAC implementation, HMAC, while CryptoAPI supports both CBC-MAC and HMAC. Neither quite follows the API outlined in this recipe, though they stray in different ways. OpenSSL performs the reset operation the same way as the initialization operation (you just pass in 0 in place of the key and the algorithm arguments). CryptoAPI does not allow resetting the context object, and instead requires that a completely new context object be created. OMAC and HMAC do not take a nonce by default. See Recipe 6.12 to see how to use these algorithms with a nonce. To see how to use the incremental HMAC interface in OpenSSL and CryptoAPI, see Recipe 6.10. CryptoAPI does not have an all-in-one interface, but instead requires use of its incremental API. Most libraries also provide an all-in-one interface to the MACs they provide. For example, the HMAC all-in-one function for OpenSSL looks like this: unsigned char *HMAC(const EVP_MD *evp_md, const void *key, int key_len, const unsigned char *msg, int msglen, unsigned char *tag, unsigned int *tag_len); There is some variation in all-in-one APIs. Some are single-pass, like the OpenSSL API described in this section. Others have a separate initialization step and a context object, so that you do not need to specify the underlying cryptographic primitive and rekey every single time you want to use the MAC. That is, such interfaces automatically call functions for resetting, updating, and finalization for you. 6.9.4 See Also Recipe 4.11, Recipe 6.10, Recipe 6.12, Recipe 6.18, Recipe 6.21 |