  In the past, two main approaches for the purpose of authentication, including
information-theoretic authentication codes and complexity-theoretic message
authentication codes (MACs), were almost independently developed. In this
paper, we propose a new cryptographic primitive, namely, artificial-noise-aided
MACs (ANA-MACs), which can be considered as both computationally secure and
information-theoretically secure. For ANA-MACs, we introduce artificial noise
to interfere with the complexity-theoretic MACs and quantization is further
employed to facilitate packet-based transmission. With a channel coding
formulation of key recovery in the MACs, the generation of standard
authentication tags can be seen as an encoding process for the ensemble of
codes, where the shared key between Alice and Bob is considered as the input
and the message is used to specify a code from the ensemble of codes. Then, we
show that the introduction of artificial noise in ANA-MACs can be well employed
to resist the key recovery attack even if the opponent has an unlimited
computing power. Finally, a pragmatic approach for the analysis of ANA-MACs is
provided, and we show how to balance the three performance metrics, including
the completeness error, the false acceptance probability, and the conditional
equivocation about the key. The analysis can be well applied to a class of
ANA-MACs, where MACs with Rijndael cipher are employed.
