Serious Cryptography

7KEYED HASHING

The hash functions discussed in Chapter 6 take a message and return its hash value—typically a short string of 256 or 512 bits. Anyone can compute the hash value of a message and verify that a particular message hashes to a particular value because there’s no secret value involved, but sometimes you don’t want to let just anyone do that. That’s where keyed hash functions come in, or hashing with secret keys.

Keyed hashing forms the basis of two types of important cryptographic algorithms: message authentication codes (MACs), which authenticate a message and protect its integrity, and pseudorandom functions (PRFs), which produce ...