ARTIFICIAL-NOISE-AIDED MESSAGE AUTHENTICATION CODES WITH INFORMATION-THEORETIC SECURITY

Message authentication is to ensure that an accepted message truly comes from its acclaimed transmitter. In this paper, we develop new cryptographic primitive, artificial-noise-aided MACs (ANA-MACs) for ensuring both computational and information-theoretic securities. The use of artificial noise in ANA-MACs makes it difficult for an opponent to derive the key. With the use of quantization, ANA-MACs can be encapsulated and transmitted in packets above the physical layer, just like the traditional MACs, which is in sharp contrast to existing physical layer authentication schemes. Finally, a pragmatic approach for the analysis of ANA-MACs is provided, and we show how to balance the three performance metrics, including the completeness error, the false acceptance probability, and the conditional equivocation about the key.