Paper 2022/449

On End-to-End Encryption

Britta Hale and Chelsea Komlo

Abstract

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is vitally important to security and privacy online, yet currently under-defined. In this note, we map intuitive notions of end-to-end encryption to existing notions of encryption. In particular, we introduce the notion of endness as an notion which end-to-end systems must achieve in addition to traditional security notions associated with encryption, and provide formalizations to capture practical requirements. We demonstrate how the notion of encryption plus endness relates to a variety of case studies that either meet normative security understanding of E2EE or are considered normative failures. Finally, we extend these observations to authentication, and real-world authenticated channel use variants, including authenticated encryption with associated data and message franking.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE)End-to-End Authentication (E2EA)authentication with associated data (AEAD)System SecuritySecure Channels
Contact author(s)
britta hale @ nps edu
ckomlo @ uwaterloo ca
History
2022-04-12: last of 2 revisions
2022-04-12: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/449
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/449,
      author = {Britta Hale and Chelsea Komlo},
      title = {On End-to-End Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/449},
      year = {2022},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/449}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/449}
}
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