4. Truncation

4.1 Implementation Note

HMAC is defined in such a way that the underlying hash function H can be used with no modification to its code. In particular, it uses the function H with the pre-defined initial value IV (a fixed value specified by each iterative hash function to initialize its compression function). However, if desired, a performance improvement can be achieved at the cost of (possibly) modifying the code of H to support variable IVs.

The idea is that the intermediate results of the compression function on the B-byte blocks (K XOR ipad) and (K XOR opad) can be precomputed only once at the time of generation of the key K, or before its first use. These intermediate results are stored and then used to initialize the IV of H each time that a message needs to be authenticated. This method saves, for each authenticated message, the application of the compression function of H on two B-byte blocks (i.e., on (K XOR ipad) and (K XOR opad)). Such a savings may be significant when authenticating short streams of data. We stress that the stored intermediate values need to be treated and protected the same as secret keys.

Choosing to implement HMAC in the above way is a decision of the local implementation and has no effect on inter-operability.

4.2 Truncated Output

A well-known practice with message authentication codes is to truncate the output of the MAC and output only part of the bits (e.g., [MM, ANSI]). Preneel and van Oorschot [PV] show some analytical advantages of truncating the output of hash-based MAC functions. The results in this area are not absolute as for the overall security advantages of truncation. It has advantages (less information on the hash result available to an attacker) and disadvantages (less bits to predict for the attacker). Applications of HMAC can choose to truncate the output of HMAC by outputting the t leftmost bits of the HMAC computation for some parameter t (namely, the computation is carried in the normal way as defined in section 2 above but the end result is truncated to t bits). We recommend that the output length t be not less than half the length of the hash output (to match the birthday attack bound) and not less than 80 bits (a suitable lower bound on the number of bits that need to be predicted by an attacker). We propose denoting a realization of HMAC that uses a hash function H with t bits of output as HMAC-H-t. For example, HMAC-SHA1-80 denotes HMAC computed using the SHA-1 function and with the output truncated to 80 bits. (If the parameter t is not specified, e.g. HMAC-MD5, then it is assumed that all the bits of the hash are output.)