Abstract
Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are the de facto standard to ensure authenticity and integrity in constrained machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Yet, research on optimizing MACs for these environments has received little systematic treatment, and deployed protocols still rely on generic constructions such as HMAC-SHA256 and CMAC. This SoK paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of MACs for constrained M2M communication. We survey authentication mechanisms across 10 deployment domains, identify 20 lightweight MAC schemes through a systematic literature review, and evaluate 13 of them on embedded hardware, showing that software-implemented lightweight MACs can outperform hardware-accelerated conventional schemes and authenticated encryption for the short payloads prevalent in practice. We further consolidate research on MAC aggregation and MAC-based multicast authentication, the latter growing more relevant as post-quantum requirements push digital signatures further out of reach. From this, we derive open challenges and provide actionable guidance for researchers and system designers.
Dr. Eric Wagner
External Researcher / FKIE
Shalini Banerjee
David Heye, M.Sc.
Researcher
Jan Bauer
Lennart Bader
Klaus Wehrle
Head of Group
Andy Rupp
Dr. rer. nat. Jan Pennekamp
Postdoctoral Researcher / Staff Scientist