Perfect message authentication codes are robust to small deviations from uniform key distributions
Cryptography and Security
2025-08-14 v1
Abstract
We investigate the impact of (possible) deviations of the probability distribution of key values from a uniform distribution for the information-theoretic strong, or perfect, message authentication code. We found a simple expression for the decrease in security as a function of the statistical distance between the real key probability distribution and the uniform one. In a sense, a perfect message authentication code is robust to small deviations from a uniform key distribution.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.09783,
title = {Perfect message authentication codes are robust to small deviations from uniform key distributions},
author = {Boris Ryabko},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.09783},
year = {2025}
}