Incremental Cryptography and Memory Checkers

We introduce the relationship between incremental cryptography and memory checkers. We present an incremental message authentication scheme based on the XOR MACs which supports insertion, deletion and other single block operations. Our scheme takes only a constant number of pseudorandom function evaluations for each update step and produces smaller authentication codes than the tree scheme presented in BGG95]. Furthermore, it is secure against message substitution attacks, where the adversary is allowed to tamper messages before update steps, making it applicable to virus protection. From this scheme we derive memory checkers for data structures based on lists. Conversely, we use a lower bound for memory checkers to show that so-called message substitution detecting schemes produce signatures or authentication codes with size proportional to the message length.