Garavel-Marsso-17

A Large Term Rewrite System Modelling a Pioneering Cryptographic Algorithm

Hubert Garavel and Lina Marsso

Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems (MARS 2017), Uppsala, Sweden, April 2017

Abstract:

We present a term rewrite system that formally models the Message Authenticator Algorithm (MAA), which was one of the first cryptographic functions for computing a Message Authentication Code and was adopted, between 1987 and 2001, in international standards (ISO 8730 and ISO 8731-2) to ensure the authenticity and integrity of banking transactions. Our term rewrite system is large (13 sorts, 18 constructors, 644 non-constructors, and 684 rewrite rules), confluent, and terminating. Implementations in thirteen different languages have been automatically derived from this model and used to validate 200 official test vectors for the MAA.

55 pages
PDF

PostScript
Slides of H. Garavel's lecture at the MARS'17 workshop
PDF
(slides prepared together with L. Marsso)


ERRATUM [May 2, 2017]

There is a minor error in a comment line of Annex B.20: the last line of page 178 should read:

% key (J = x00FF00FF, K = x00000000), message (M1 = xAAAAAAAA, M2 = x55555555)
rather than:
% key (J = x00FF00FF, K = x00000000), message (M1 = x55555555, M2 = xAAAAAAAA)