Authenticated Message Verification

• Authenticated message verification is a cryptographic process that ensures messages are genuine, unaltered, and delivered within acceptable time bounds.
• It employs a range of methods including MACs, digital signatures, hash-chain protocols, and quantum techniques to secure communications in diverse applications such as industrial networks and UAS.
• Formal verification and protocol-specific optimizations like timestamping and replay prevention mechanisms provide robust defenses against adversaries in hostile network environments.

Authenticated message verification is a cryptographic process that assures a recipient that a received message indeed originates from a verified sender, has not been tampered with, and often arrives within acceptable time bounds. Protocols achieving authenticated message verification span classical symmetric/asymmetric cryptography, information-theoretic constructs, hash-chain MACs, and even quantum methods. The guarantees supported by these constructs are indispensable for secure communications in adversarial settings, including industrial networks, distributed storage, UAS, and vehicular environments.

1. Cryptographic Primitives and Protocol Construction

Authenticated message verification commonly relies on MACs (Message Authentication Codes), digital signatures, timestamping, and (in quantum settings) entanglement and classical–quantum hybrids. Classical approaches employ symmetric primitives (e.g., HMAC), asymmetric schemes (RSA signatures), or MACs with information-theoretic security grounded in universal hash functions and quantum randomness.

An example is the cryptographic model in "An authentication model based on cryptography" (Obeidat et al., 2021), where registration gives users a Private Card containing per-user RC4-Pr keys and an RSA keypair. During authenticated exchanges, the sender signs message digests and metadata under their RSA private key, encrypts both message and signature, and the recipient verifies authenticity and freshness with signature, hash, and timestamp checks. The key formulas include

• $u_\text{sig} = \mathrm{RSA}_\text{PR}_1(\text{uid}_1 \parallel H(\text{msg}) \parallel K' \parallel T_1)$
• Mutual key derivation: $K' = H(\text{uid}_2 \parallel K_1)$ with symmetric encryption for bulk data and signatures for authenticity.

Protocols for road networks use pseudonymous identities, shared session keys, HMACs, and challenge–response mechanisms; authenticated messages are tagged with $\sigma_i = h(\text{SK}_{i,j} \parallel m)$, enabling $O(1)$ verification and ephemeral keying for unlinkability (Memon et al., 2017).

Quantum and semi-quantum protocols encode authentication into Bell-state entanglement and pre-shared secrets, with single-qubit intervention yielding detection probability converging to $1$ (Luo et al., 2015).

2. Formal Models and Verification Methodologies

High-assurance domains increasingly adopt formal symbolic approaches for protocol verification. The Permission Voucher protocol is modeled and proven in Tamarin, with authentication, integrity, mutual authentication, and replay prevention expressed as multiset-rewriting rules and temporal/knowledge predicates (Reaz et al., 2024). Core properties are stated as lemmas in Tamarin's logic,

$$\forall\,\mathit{voucherID},\,\mathit{data\_items},\,\mathit{private\_key},\,\#i,\,\#j.\;\Big( \mathrm{Out}(\mathrm{sign}(\mathrm{create\_voucher}(\mathit{voucherID},\mathit{data\_items}),\mathit{private\_key}))@\#i \wedge \mathrm{K}(\mathit{private\_key})@\#j \Big) \Longrightarrow (\#i = \#j)$$

guaranteeing that only honest parties may produce valid, signed vouchers.

Replay prevention is typically enforced via nonces and tracked events; integrity is established by unique signature events. Structures such as dependency graphs are used to visualize protocol state and fact propagation across the system.

Information-theoretic security models leverage QKD channels, universal$_2$ hash families, and third-party timestamped verification for distributed storage, giving statistical guarantees against forgery and replay with negligible collision probability (Fujiwara et al., 2021).

3. Protocol-Specific Mechanisms and Implementations

Many real-world deployments demand protocol adaptability, legacy compatibility, and efficiency. The ACRIC scheme overwrites legacy CRC fields with cryptographically authenticated CRCs: $$SecCRC_i(M_i) = F_{\mathrm{CRC}}(\mathrm{IV},M_i) \oplus h_i$$, with $h_i=H(K_s,h_{i-1})$ and IV derived from secret session key. This preserves bit-exact message layouts for legacy devices, enabling a gradual transition to secure operation (Lotto et al., 2024).

The TBRD system secures UAS broadcast Remote ID using the TESLA protocol managed by a trusted execution environment (TEE). It divides missions into intervals, uses delayed key disclosure, and HMAC-SHA256 for MAC computation, while verifiers check mission scope, timing, and key-chain membership to validate authenticity with low computational and communication overhead (Veara et al., 13 Oct 2025).

Semi-quantum direct communication as in (Luo et al., 2015) combines pre-shared keys, Bell-state encoding, and one-way hash integrity checks. Detection of tampering (single-qubit or multi-qubit) occurs with overwhelming probability per message.

The following table summarizes distinctive mechanisms across major protocol classes.

Approach	Core Primitive(s)	Freshness/Replay Defense
RSA + Symmetric	Signatures + RC4-Pr	Timestamp window, per-recipient key
HMAC-based	Session HMAC	Timestamps, pseudonyms, nonces
TESLA MAC Chain	Hash keychain, TEE	Interval-based delayed disclosure
CRC-based (ACRIC)	Legacy CRC + hash	Hash-chain index, one-time pad
Quantum (ASQDC)	Bell states + hash	Qubit order, hash check, reflection
ITS MAC + QKD	Universal$_2$ hash	Timestamped tags, third-party V

4. Security Properties, Threat Models, and Analysis

Protocols are designed to withstand Dolev–Yao adversaries: attackers with full network control capable of interception, injection, modification, and replay, but lacking access to ephemeral secrets, private keys, hash chain values, and quantum randomness. Security properties typically include:

• Authenticity: Only legitimate parties can produce valid authenticated messages.
• Integrity: Undetected modification is statistically or computationally infeasible.
• Freshness: Replay or injection of old/misdirected messages fails, regularly via time-based checks or hash chain pointers.
• Privacy/Unlinkability: Session pseudonym changes and ephemeral keying prevent cross-session tracking.

ACRIC achieves $2^{-n}$ unforgeability by XORing legacy CRC outputs with OTP-secured hash values, proven in Scyther. TBRD’s TESLA-based MACs rely on the infeasibility of HMAC-SHA256 forgery within the window of delayed key disclosure, with USS-managed session commitments. Quantum protocols attain information-theoretic security with hash-based collision probability vanishing as $2^{-k\log_2|D|}$ (Fujiwara et al., 2021).

5. Performance and Deployment Considerations

Efficiency, overhead, and compatibility are central for adoption in resource-constrained or legacy environments. ACRIC imposes only a ∼4 μs increase over CRC-only processing per message (10 % overhead), affecting neither throughput nor memory constraints (Lotto et al., 2024). In UAS broadcast settings TBRD offers a 50 % reduction in authentication payload size and 100× lower computation time versus standard ECC-based signatures (Veara et al., 13 Oct 2025).

For road network protocols, per-message HMAC verification completes in 0.02 ms with packet loss rates <1 % at high network load (Memon et al., 2017). Information-theoretically secure distributed storage systems maintain negligible latency and communication overhead by hash-based MAC tagging and QKD-based seed exchange (Fujiwara et al., 2021).

Deployment strategies prioritize backward compatibility. ACRIC’s authenticated CRCs allow staged migration without hardware updates; secure and legacy devices can coexist. TBRD’s use of vendor extension fields in OpenDroneID maintains compliance with existing standards.

6. Protocol Extensions and Future Directions

To further harden protocols, extensions include explicit timestamp-based expiry checks (as in Permission Voucher (Reaz et al., 2024)), mutual authentication upgrades to block insider threats, and quantum-resistant key management. Scalability and symbolic verification challenges in complex systems prompt ongoing research into tool optimization and modular protocol composition.

In quantum and semi-quantum settings, ongoing work targets robustness against operational noise, side-channel vulnerabilities such as Trojan-horse attacks, and efficient error correction.

A plausible implication is that authenticated message verification will remain a focal point for both classical and quantum research, as protocols seek stronger security, greater efficiency, and seamless legacy integration in increasingly adversarial and heterogeneous network environments.