Paper 2005/211

Games and the Impossibility of Realizable Ideal Functionality

Anupam Datta and Ante Derek and John C. Mitchell and Ajith Ramanathan and Andre Scedrov

Abstract

A cryptographic primitive or a security mechanism can be specified in a variety of ways, such as a condition involving a game against an attacker, construction of an ideal functionality, or a list of properties that must hold in the face of attack. While game conditions are widely used, an ideal functionality is appealing because a mechanism that is indistinguishable from an ideal functionality is therefore guaranteed secure in any larger system that uses it. We relate ideal functionalities to games by defining the \textit{set} of ideal functionalities associated with a game condition and show that under this definition, which reflects accepted use and known examples, bit commitment, a form of group signatures, and some other cryptographic concepts do not have any realizable ideal functionality.