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I often read that MAC's provide a proof of authenticity of a payload 'in transit'.

I'm wondering though is there any special definition of "in transit" that would prevent it from being reliable over a long period of time - for example proving the data was not simply corrupted by a storage medium.

if the meaning is 'over the wire where an attacker only has a short amount of time to successfully modify the payload and MAC', then the implication would be that it is unsafe to store the payload and MAC long term to provide authenticity at a later date.

The meaning I'm guessing is 'end to end' authenticity, say between Alice and Bob independent of time.

This may be a silly question that simply boils down to are MACs secure, then that would be dependent on the specific HMAC, GMAC or what ever is used.

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In secure transport protocols, the authentication tag (i.e. MAC value) is usually calculated with a session key. This session key is not linked to the data that is send, it is just used to protect the records within the transport protocol. Hence after processing the records, the tag is stripped off to retrieve the actual data that was send. Furthermore, after the session ends the session key gets destroyed - it is often not available at application level.

So although the authentication tag does protect the data while it is "in transit" it doesn't offer any protection afterwards. This is not because the MAC algorithm is not strong enough, it's just that the authentication tag and session key are not available anymore to validate the integrity/authenticity (as explained above). HMAC's are actually one of the most reliable schemes out there.

As example take the various TLS libraries. I don't know any where the TLS records or the session key is passed on to the application layer. TLS always protects the data with an authentication tag regardless.

To protect the data outside the transport protocol it is required to add protection in an application level protocol. For instance it is possible to send enveloped messages using the Cryptographic Message Syntax. For this long term keys are required. It is certainly possible to use a MAC to do add integrity to application level messages for long term storage.

Signatures are more common though. This is because a MAC requires a shared secret; symmetric cryptography is cumbersome when it comes to key management between different parties.

As it is now seems common to add a tl;dr: It's not so much the properties of the MAC rather than how it is used within a protocol that makes it just protect messages in transit.

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  • $\begingroup$ No problem and I'll write an old style conclusion next time :P $\endgroup$
    – Maarten Bodewes ♦
    Dec 13, 2016 at 21:56
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HMAC protects the payload as long as the hash function remains safe and the secret key is kept secret. Whether this is only needed for a short period of time or a long period of time.

So I suppose in the case of in transit you could say this means for the transfer and checking of the message, long term storage, etc.

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