Secure Message Authentication Using HMAC

Abstract

RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks exemplify computationally constrained
environments, where the compact nature of the components cannot support complex
computations or high communication overhead. On the other hand, such components
should support security applications such as message integrity, authentication, and time
stamping. The latter are efficiently implemented by Hash Message Authentication Codes
(HMAC). As clearly stated in the literature, current approved implementations of HMAC
require resources that cannot be supported in constrained components. An approach to
implement a compact HMAC by the use of stream ciphering is presented in this paper