Semantically-Secure Functional Encryption: Possibility Results, Impossibility Results and the Quest for a General Definition

Mihir Bellare; Adam O'Neill

Paper 2012/515

Semantically-Secure Functional Encryption: Possibility Results, Impossibility Results and the Quest for a General Definition

Mihir Bellare and Adam O'Neill

Abstract

This paper explains that SS1-secure functional encryption (FE) as defined by Boneh, Sahai and Waters implicitly incorporates security under key-revealing selective opening attacks (SOA-K). This connection helps intuitively explain their impossibility results and also allows us to prove stronger ones. To fill this gap and move us closer to the (laudable) goal of a general and achievable notion of FE security, we seek and provide two ``sans SOA-K'' definitions of FE security that we call SS2 and SS3. We prove various possibility results about these definitions. We view our work as a first step towards the challenging goal of a general, meaningful and achievable notion of FE security.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Keywords: Functional encryption semantic-security identity-based encryption
Contact author(s): amoneill @ bu edu
History: 2012-09-05: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2012/515
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2012/515,
      author = {Mihir Bellare and Adam O'Neill},
      title = {Semantically-Secure Functional Encryption: Possibility Results, Impossibility Results and the Quest for a General Definition},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2012/515},
      year = {2012},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/515}
}