Paper 2026/2270

UC PAKE and Concrete Security

Tingfei Feng, Oregon State University
Jiayu Xu, Oregon State University
Abstract

The Universal Composability (UC) framework provides a paradigm for security definitions that allows for arbitrary composition, but has been criticized for being unamicable to the concrete security approach, as the meaning of a concrete UC-security statement is hard to interpret in practice. This work aims at alleviating this concern in the context of Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE): we show that any concrete UC-security statement for PAKE can be easily converted to a concrete game-based security statement, whose real-life meaning is clearer. We also briefly discuss potential generalizations of our result to other cryptographic primitives.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
universal composabilityPAKE
Contact author(s)
fengti @ oregonstate edu
xujiay @ oregonstate edu
History
2026-09-30: approved
2026-09-29: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/2270
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/2270,
      author = {Tingfei Feng and Jiayu Xu},
      title = {{UC} {PAKE} and Concrete Security},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/2270},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2270}
}
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