[366] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Digital Signatures
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Mon Mar 17 12:50:19 1997
To: weboland@globalkey.com
cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 17 Mar 1997 10:09:54 MST."
<10001638@mailman.globalkey.com>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 12:40:11 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
weboland@globalkey.com writes:
> Perry / Adam:
> Regarding your term "keyed hash". Are you including in
> this term the methodology in which a message hash is "encrypted" with a
> symmetric algorithm using a "shared" secret key?
"keyed hash" is a well known term of art -- it refers to schemes in
which secret text is somehow attached to a plaintext before it is
hashed. This means that reproducing the hash requires knowledge of the
secret, which may be regarded as an authentication key.
Straightforward methods of doing keyed hashes turn out to be inferior
to mechanisms like HMAC which have better cryptographic security --
these methods are also considered keyed hashes, however.
Perry
