igest, and CMAC uses a cipher. Therefore, there are sometimes two contexts to keep track of, one for the MAC algorithm itself and one for the underlying computation algorithm if there is one.</p>

<p>To make things less ambiguous, this manual talks about a &quot;context&quot; or &quot;MAC context&quot;, which is to denote the MAC level context, and about a &quot;underlying context&quot;, or &quot;computation context&quot;, which is to denote the context for the underlying computation algorithm if there is o