Construction of Cartesian authentication codes from unitary geometry (Q1203950)

It is quite well known that a communication between two parties can be effectively spoiled by appropriate activity of an opponent, namely by impersonation attack or substitution attack. In the former type of attack the opponent sends a message through the communication channel, in the later the opponent intercepts a message sent by the transmitter to the receiver, and subsequently sends another message to the receiver, in both cases hoping that the receiver will accept opponent's messages as authentic ones. To protect against such attacks an authentication code may be used. In the paper three constructions of Cartesian authentication codes are given. It starts with short introduction followed by a survey of the main features of the unitary geometry over finite fields later used to prove the results. Then construction of authentication codes are presented in a uniform style. For every construction its description is given followed by series of lemmas to prove that the construction indeed yields a Cartesian authentication code, to give its size parameters, and to compute probabilities of successful impersonation and substitution attacks (under the assumption that the encoding rules are chosen according to a uniform probability distribution). Finally a summarizing Theorem for the construction is given together with some corollaries. For two constructions their generalizations are also outlined.