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abstract: |
    Information-theoretically secure (ITS) authentication is needed in Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). In this paper, we study security of an ITS authentication scheme proposed by Wegman&Carter, in the case of partially known authentication key. This scheme uses a new authentication key in each authentication attempt, to select a hash function from an Almost Strongly Universal$_2$ hash function family. The partial knowledge of the attacker is measured as the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform distribution; this is the usual measure in QKD. We provide direct proofs of security of the scheme, when using partially known key, first in the information-theoretic setting and then in terms of witness indistinguishability as used in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We find that if the authentication procedure has a failure probability ${\varepsilon}$ and the authentication key has an ${\varepsilon}'$ trace distance to the uniform, then under ITS, the adversary’s success probability conditioned on an authentic message-tag pair is only bounded by ${\varepsilon}+|{\mathcal{T}}|{\varepsilon}'$, where $|{\mathcal{T}}|$ is the size of the set of tags. Furthermore, the trace distance between the authentication key distribution and the uniform increases to $|{\mathcal{T}}|{\varepsilon}'$ after having seen an authentic message-tag pair. Despite this, we are 