Paper 2008/375

A public key encryption scheme secure against key dependent chosen plaintext and adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks

Jan Camenisch, Nishanth Chandran, and Victor Shoup

Abstract

Recently, at Crypto 2008, Boneh, Halevi, Hamburg, and Ostrovsky (BHHO) solved the long-standing open problem of ``circular encryption,'' by presenting a public key encryption scheme and proving that it is semantically secure against key dependent chosen plaintext attack (KDM-CPA security) under standard assumptions (and without resorting to random oracles). However, they left as an open problem that of designing an encryption scheme that \emph{simultaneously} provides security against both key dependent chosen plaintext \emph{and} adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (KDM-CCA2 security). In this paper, we solve this problem. First, we show that by applying the Naor-Yung ``double encryption'' paradigm, one can combine any KDM-CPA secure scheme with any (ordinary) CCA2 secure scheme, along with an appropriate non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, to obtain a KDM-CCA2 secure scheme. Second, we give a concrete instantiation that makes use the above KDM-CPA secure scheme of BHHO, along with a generalization of the Cramer-Shoup CCA2 secure encryption scheme, and recently developed pairing-based NIZK proof systems. This instantiation increases the complexity of the BHHO scheme by just a small constant factor.