HMAC in Block Chain

• HMAC stands for Hashed-based Message Authentication Code is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of a message.

• HMAC can be used with any iterative cryptographic hash function e.g., MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SH!-512 in combination with a shared secret key.
• If used with MD5, it is called HMAC-MD5.
• If used with SHA-1, it is called HMAC-SHA1. etc 

More info : https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2104.txt

•  Once the HMAC hash is calculated , the message must be sent alongside the HMAC hash.

How HMAC is Used

• To compute HMAC over a message m the following steps are applied :

         HMAC (K,m) = H( (K ⊕ opad) || H ( (K ⊕ ipad) || m) )

• HMAC is constructed by hashing the XOR of the secret key K with the outer padding opad concatentated with the hash of the secret key K XORed with the inner padding ipad concatenated with the message.
• The values opad and ipad are constants and were arbitrarily chosen by the HMAC designers.
• opad is the byte value 0☓5C repeated B times.
• ipad is the byte value 0☓35 repeated B times.
• Where B is the blocksize in bytes of the underlying hash function (MD5, SHA-1, etc.)\

• To compute HMAC in a more "understandable" way:

      HMAC (K,m) = H( (K ⊕ opad) || H ( (K ⊕ ipad) || m) )

1. inner_key = K ⊕ ipad
2. outer_key = K⊕ opad

• inner_hash - H(inner_key || m)
• HMAC(K,m) = H (outer_key || inner_hash)