Paper 2025/309 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/309 ↗

A Unified Treatment of Anamorphic Encryption

Abstract

(Receiver) anamorphic encryption, introduced by Persiano et al. [Eurocrypt'22], allows for hiding a covert message $\hat{m}$ (dubbed the anamorphic message) within a public-key ciphertext encrypting another message $m$ so that: (1) a "dictator" adversary with access to the associated secret key cannot detect that such an $\hat{m}$ has been hidden, let alone learn information about it, and (2) knowledge of an additional key (called the double key), which is kept hidden from the dictator, allows to fully recover $\hat{m}$. Anamorphic encryption schemes are typically constructed by mixing symmetric-key and public-key encryption in a clever way, and existing instantiations achieve a variety of novel security guarantees. This has resulted in a disparate landscape of security notions for anamorphic encryption with no systematization and fragmented knowledge about the relationships between them. We put forth a systematic study of anamorphic encryption and summarize our findings as follows. We begin by developing a template for defining indistinguishability-based security for anamorphic encryption. From this, we systematically obtain several new but meaningful definitions for anamorphic encryption. We contextualize all existing and new security notions by proving implications and separations between them. Our methodology also covers asymmetric anamorphic encryption---where the anamorphic message $\hat{m}$ is hidden using public-key techniques---and uncovers a security setting not previously considered: when the dictator and the anamorphic sender collude. Finally, we apply our treatment to capture chosen-ciphertext attacks, which were recently introduced to anamorphic cryptography by Jaeger and Stracovsky [Asiacrypt'24], and propose the first construction of anamorphic encryption that achieves all desirable security properties in this setting.