The Message Authenticator Algorithm (MAA) was one of the first

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

functions for computing a

message authentication code In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as an authentication tag, is a short piece of information used for authentication, authenticating and Data integrity, integrity-checking a message. In other words, it is used t ...

(MAC).

History

It was designed in 1983 by

Donald Davies Donald Watts Davies, (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL). During 1965-67 he invented modern data communications, including packet s ...

and David Clayden at the

National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the national measurement standards laboratory of the United Kingdom. It sets and maintains physical standards for British industry. Founded in 1900, the NPL is one of the oldest metrology institutes i ...

in response to a request of the UK Bankers Automated Clearing Services. The MAA was one of the first Message Authentication Code algorithms to gain widespread acceptance.

Development and standardization

The original specification of the MAA was given in a combination of natural language and tables, complemented by two implementations in C and

BASIC Basic or BASIC may refer to: Science and technology * BASIC, a computer programming language * Basic (chemistry), having the properties of a base * Basic access authentication, in HTTP Entertainment * Basic (film), ''Basic'' (film), a 2003 film ...

programming languages. The MAA was adopted by

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

in 1987 and became part of international standards ISO 8730 and ISO 8731-2 intended to secure the authenticity and integrity of banking transactions.

Attacks

Later, cryptanalysis of MAA revealed various weaknesses, including feasible brute-force attacks, existence of collision clusters, and key-recovery techniques. For this reason, MAA was withdrawn from ISO standards in 2002 but continued to be used as a prominent case study for assessing various

formal methods In computer science, formal methods are mathematics, mathematically rigorous techniques for the formal specification, specification, development, Program analysis, analysis, and formal verification, verification of software and computer hardware, ...

Formal specifications of the MAA

The MAA has been used as a prominent case study for assessing various

. In the early 1990s, the NPL developed three formal specifications of the MAA: one in Z, one in LOTOS, and one in VDM. The VDM specification became part of the 1992 revision of the International Standard 8731-2, and three implementations were manually derived from that latter specification: C, Miranda, and

Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...

. Other formal models of the MAA have been developed. In 2017, a complete formal specification of the MAA as a large

term rewriting system In mathematics, computer science, and logic, rewriting covers a wide range of methods of replacing subterms of a formula with other terms. Such methods may be achieved by rewriting systems (also known as rewrite systems, rewrite engines, or reduc ...

was published; From this specification
implementations of the MAA in fifteen different languages
have been generated automatically. In 2018, two new formal specifications of the MAA, in LOTOS and LNT, have been published.

References

External links

* * http://www.cix.co.uk/~klockstone/maa.htm * http://www.mars-workshop.org/repository/012-MAA.html {{Cryptography navbox, hash Cryptographic hash functions Broken hash functions Checksum algorithms