A tight bound for exhaustive key search attacks against Message Authentication Codes
A Message Authentication Code (MAC) is a function that takes a message and a key as parameters and outputs an authentication of the message. MAC are used to guarantee the legitimacy of messages exchanged through a network, since generating a correct authentication requires the knowledge of the key defined secretly by trusted parties. However, an attacker with access to a sufficiently large number of message/authentication pairs may use a brute force algorithm to infer the secret key: from a set...