Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 1996/002

Deniable Encryption

Ran Canetti, Cynthia Dwork, Moni Naor, Rafi Ostrovsky

Abstract: Consider a situation in which the transmission of encrypted messages is intercepted by an adversary who can later ask the sender to reveal the random choices (and also the secret key, if one exists) used in generating the ciphertext, thereby exposing the cleartext. An encryption scheme is <B>deniable</B> if the sender can generate `fake random choices' that will make the ciphertext `look like' an encryption of a different cleartext, thus keeping the real cleartext private. Analogous requirements can be formulated with respect to attacking the receiver and with respect to attacking both parties.

In this paper we introduce deniable encryption and propose constructions of schemes with polynomial deniability. In addition to being interesting by itself, and having several applications, deniable encryption provides a simplified and elegant construction of <B>adaptively secure</B> multiparty computation.

Category / Keywords: Encryption, Public key, Private key, Coercion, Voting.

Publication Info: Appeared in the THEORY OF CRYPTOGRAPHY LIBRARY and has been included in the ePrint Archive.

Date: received May 10th, 1996

Contact author: canetti at theory lcs mit edu

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/1996/002