A construction for optimal <Emphasis Type="Italic">c</Emphasis>-splitting authentication and secrecy codes

Authentication and secrecy codes which provide both secrecy and authentication have been intensively studied in the case where there is no splitting; however the results concerning the case where there is splitting are far fewer. In this paper, we focus on the case with c-splitting, and obtain a bound on the number of encoding rules required in order to obtain maximum levels of security. A c-splitting authentication and secrecy code is called optimal if it obtains maximum levels of security and has the minimum number of encoding rules. We define a new design, called an authentication perpendicular multi-array, and prove that the existence of authentication perpendicular multi-arrays implies the existence of optimal c-splitting authentication and secrecy codes. Further, we study the constructions and existence of authentication perpendicular multi-arrays, and then obtain two new infinite classes of optimal c-splitting authentication and secrecy codes.