An authentication code is a combinatorial tool for providing authentication: it gives users reassurance that a message was genuinely produced by the supposed sender rather than an imposter. It provides unconditional security in the sense that it does not rely on assumptions relating to the adversary's computational power. The literature on this subject is extensive. This talk will look at some of the history of the study of authentication codes and give a brief overview of the landscape of what is known about these structures. We will consider some of the more recent research on this topic and discuss some open questions.

Bio: Maura Paterson is a Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics at Birkbeck, University of London. She received a BSc (Mathematics and Computer Science) with honours in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2005 under the supervision of Simon Blackburn and Peter Wild. Her main area of research interest is applications of combinatorics to problems arising from cryptography and information security.