AEC: A Practical Scheme for Authentication with Error Correction

We present a Message Authentication Code (MAC) with integrated error correction capability, called AEC. The MAC itself can detect/correct errors upto a certain limit and provides an estimate of the number and location of the errors. The security of AEC lies in the random selection of the underlying error correcting code (ECC). In this work, we propose a new on-the-fly solution to this problem of random ECC selection, making it highly secure. Moreover, this solution combined with the simple and regular structure of Cellular Automata (CA) based ECC, makes it highly suitable for efficient hardware implementation. Detailed FPGA implementations of both standalone and compact variants of AEC, are presented on the Spartan-3 FPGA platform. The compact implementation has low area footprint and high throughput making it particularly suitable for resource constrained applications. To the best of our knowledge this is the only practical design of an ECC-MAC scheme.