[Cryptography] A Fun Trick: The Little MAC Attack

[Ray Dillinger]

On 05/10/2015 02:13 PM, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> On May 10, 2015, at 1:48 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:

>> Was the above MD5(key || message || key) a typo for

>> MD5(key || message) || key
> No.  "||" is "concatenate".

Ah.  I see; they used of a copy of the key on both ends as a
defense against extension attacks.  That makes more sense now.
Unfortunately it still doesn't do a darn thing for colliding-
block substitution in long messages.

> Unfortunately, we don't have universal agreement on some basic notation.  

Until Unicode characters are a darned sight easier to type, we won't.
There are Unicode characters for most bit operations, and I can be
driven to use them if necessary.  But they're a pain in the tush to
type, and like you I usually use ASCII substitutes.

There is a standard math notation for sequence concatenation
using U+2322, which is named FROWN and written ⌢.  This is
decimal 8994.   We could use it for string or blob concatenation,
but it's a pain in the tush to type.

I've used double slash in the past for concatenation but I have
no idea whether that's understood without providing context; I
always feel that I have to explain it whenever I use it.  And
I've seen at least one person use $+ for concatenation, which
I suppose is reasonable if you read "string" for $.

Vertical bar reads as OR to me, but that's probably because
I'm a C programmer.


				Bear

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