It was designed in 1983 by Donald Davies and David Clayden at the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) in response to a request of the UK Bankers Automated Clearing Services.
The MAA was one of the first Message Authentication Code algorithms to gain widespread acceptance.
Later, cryptanalysis of MAA revealed various weaknesses, including feasible brute-force attacks, existence of collision clusters, and key-recovery techniques.
[6][7][8][9] For this reason, MAA was withdrawn from ISO standards in 2002 but continued to be used as a prominent case study for assessing various formal methods.
In the early 1990s, the NPL developed three formal specifications of the MAA: one in Z,[11] one in LOTOS,[12] and one in VDM.