Identification of messages and identifying zeroes of a function

Contrasting to Shannon´s classical coding scheme for the transmission of a message over a noisy channel, in the theory of identification the decoder is not really interested in what the received message is, but he only wants to decide whether a message, which is of special interest to him, had been sent or not. However, the sender does not know this certain message. Another way of stating the problem is that there are several receivers obtaining the same channel output. Each receiver has to make a decision, whether his message was sent or not, and this answer has to be correct with small error probability. If one is satisfied with keeping the average error probability small, one can use traditional checksum methods, but this fails if the maximal error probability has to be controlled