In order to effectively authenticate several strings,a message authentication code named VHMAC was proposed,whose input can be a vector of strings.VHMAC was based on the composition of universal hash families.For efficiently processing a vector of strings,a parallel universal hash family was defined,its output was then put into another universal hash function.The security definitions of ordinary message authentication codes were extended to the vector-input scenario.Based on the assumption of the underlying block cipher as a pseudorandom permutation, the security of VHMAC was proved.Also,VHMAC was pre-processible and parallelizable.
