Authentication Codes and Combinatorial Designs addresses an important area in cryptography, namely the authentication of codes. It ties together the notion of authentication codes and combinatorial designs and demonstrates how ideas from combinatorics can be used for cryptographic applications. This is a comprehensive and self-contained treatment of the subject that covers optimal authentication codes, unconditionally secure authentication schemes, and both symmetric and asymmetric authentication codes. The authors prove the information-theoretic and combinatorial bounds and the conditions for achieving these bounds in simple and clean and comprehensive language of mathematics.