Cellular automata based authentication (CAA)

Current demands for secured communication have focussed intensive interest on 'Authentication'. There is a great demand for a highspeed low cost scheme for generation of Message Authentication Code (MAC). This paper introduces a new computational model built around a special class of Cellular Automata (CA) that can be employed for both message and image authentication. Cryptanalysis of the proposed scheme indicates that compared to other known schemes like MD5, SHA1 etc., the current scheme is more secure against all known attacks. High speed execution of the proposed scheme makes it ideally suitable for real time on-line applications. Further, the regular, modular, and cascadable structure of CA with local interconnections makes the scheme ideally suitable for VLSI implementation with throughput in the range of Gigabits per second.