Paper 2008/374

Chosen Ciphertext Security with Optimal Ciphertext Overhead

Masayuki Abe, Eike Kiltz, and Tatsuaki Okamoto

Abstract

Every public-key encryption scheme has to incorporate a certain amount of randomness into its ciphertexts to provide semantic security against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA). The difference between the length of a ciphertext and the embedded message is called the ciphertext overhead. While a generic brute-force adversary running in $2^t$ steps gives a theoretical lower bound of $t$ bits on the ciphertext overhead for IND-CPA security, the best known IND-CCA secure schemes demand roughly $2 t$ bits even in the random oracle model. Is the $t$-bit gap essential for achieving IND-CCA security? We close the gap by proposing an IND-CCA secure scheme whose ciphertext overhead matches the generic lower bound up to a small constant. Our scheme uses a variation of a four-round Feistel network in the random oracle model and hence belongs to the family of OAEP-based schemes. Maybe of independent interest is a new efficient method to encrypt long messages exceeding the length of the permutation while retaining the minimal overhead.