Paper 2009/418 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2009/418 ↗

Subtleties in the Definition of IND-CCA: When and How Should Challenge-Decryption be Disallowed?

Mihir Bellare
Dennis Hofheinz
Eike Kiltz
Abstract

The definition of IND-CCA disallows an adversary from querying the challenge ciphertext to its decryption oracle. We point out that there are several ways to formalize this. We show that, surprisingly, for public-key encryption the resulting notions are not all equivalent. We then consider the same question for key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and show that in this case the four notions ARE all equivalent. Our discoveries are another manifestation of the subtleties that make the study of cryptography so attractive and are important towards achieving the definitional clarity and unity required for firm foundations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2009-09-01: last updated
2009-09-01: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2009/418
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2009/418,
      author = {Mihir Bellare and Dennis Hofheinz and Eike Kiltz},
      title = {Subtleties in the Definition of IND-CCA: When and How Should Challenge-Decryption be Disallowed?},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2009/418},
      year = {2009},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2009/418}
}
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