Score:2

Paper based OTP and MAC

cn flag

Consider the following paper based OTP

  1. Plaintext has 11 possible symbols 0-10.
  2. $C_i = M_i + K_i\ mod\ 11$.
  3. $K_i$ comes from a pre-shared key material which is never reused.

How to introduce data integrity/ MAC in it which can be calculated using pen & paper.

Score:1
nr flag
J_H

Use SHA3-224 HMAC.

Define a security parameter $\kappa$, and both sides consume that much $K_i$ keying material. A paper based OTP will probably choose a smaller parameter than a TCP-based protocol would choose.

Compute and append the $\kappa$ prefix of the HMAC result to the message, encoded as base 11 digits.

Transmit the $C_i$ message as above.

Receiver computes HMAC and verifies that the prefix matches.

EDIT

...which can be calculated using pen & paper.

Oohhhh. Well there's a new wrinkle.

Define a new security parameter $D$, number of check digits to send.

Define a base $B$. It most naturally would be 11, but for human convenience we may choose to make it 10. It is possible that some casting out nines procedure would motivate using 9.

Find a running total of the various $M_i$ figures, $\mod B$, and write the number down beneath each $M_i$.

Append the final $D$ such numbers to the message.

Transmit this augmented message as OP describes. Notice that each check digit is protected by its own $K_i$.

Receiver performs the same steps to verify.


Observation: Mallet has a much better chance for undetected corruption of one of the final $D$ characters of the original message under this "scheme-A", especially if he wants to corrupt its final character.

Remedy: In "scheme-B", consume $D$ characters of the $K_i$ keying material and append those to the original message at the very beginning of the procedure, so we're transmitting a checksum of characters both unknown and known to the recipient.


Assume that "keying material is cheap", so for example we are willing to consume 200 characters of $K_i$ to send a message of length 100. Could we use that to improve robustness? Assume that "$D$ is small", that is, $D < \sqrt{ |M| }$ where $|M|$ is length of message.

Second observation: Humans are fallible. Sometimes we write down arithmetic mistakes. Could we rescue parts of a message that Alice accidentally garbled?

Remedy: Starting from the message's end, break out $D$ message chunks. Most will be of equal size; the first few are likely to be shorter by one. Compute and transmit per-chunk checksums independently.

At this point I also want to send "more than one" (how many?) combined checksum digits which summarize the individual transmitted checksums. Maybe one for the odds, one for the evens? Or a tree that transmits eight checksums, then four checksums of pairs, then two checksums, then finally a master checksum?

Leaning on the "fallibility" aspect, maybe spend part of our checksum budget on computing / transmitting checksums of reversed message characters?

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