Patent ID: 8856883

Claim:
A method for protecting medium access control (MAC) control messages in a wireless communication network comprising: determining, by a network device, that a first MAC control message content is protected if an indicator within the first MAC control message content is set; validating, if the indicator is set, integrity of the first MAC control message content in conjunction with a cipher-message authentication code (CMAC) tuple concatenated with the first MAC control message content, the CMAC tuple comprising a portion of a CMAC value that is truncated to a first predetermined number of most-significant bits of the CMAC value; locating the CMAC tuple in the MAC control message based on a byte alignment of the CMAC tuple in the MAC control message, wherein a length of the first MAC control message content has been padded to provide byte alignment of the CMAC tuple; and decoding the MAC control message using the CMAC tuple.