## CryptoDB

### Christopher Portmann

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2021
PKC
This paper takes a fresh approach to systematically characterizing, comparing, and understanding CCA-type security definitions for public-key encryption (PKE), a topic with a long history. The justification for a concrete security definition X is relative to a benchmark application (e.g. confidential communication): Does the use of a PKE scheme satisfying X imply the security of the application? Because unnecessarily strong definitions may lead to unnecessarily inefficient schemes or unnecessarily strong computational assumptions, security definitions should be as weak as possible, i.e. as close as possible to (but above) the benchmark. Understanding the hierarchy of security definitions, partially ordered by the implication (i.e. at least as strong) relation, is hence important, as is placing the relevant applications as benchmark levels within the hierarchy. CCA-2 security is apparently the strongest notion, but because it is arguably too strong, Canetti, Krawczyk, and Nielsen (Crypto 2003) proposed the relaxed notions of Replayable CCA security (RCCA) as perhaps the weakest meaningful definition, and they investigated the space between CCA and RCCA security by proposing two versions of Detectable RCCA (d-RCCA) security which are meant to ensure that replays of ciphertexts are either publicly or secretly detectable (and hence preventable). The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, following the work of Coretti, Maurer, and Tackmann (Asiacrypt 2013), we formalize the three benchmark applications of PKE that serve as the natural motivation for security notions, namely the construction of certain types of (possibly replay-protected) confidential channels (from an insecure and an authenticated communication channel). Second, we prove that RCCA does not achieve the confidentiality benchmark and, contrary to previous belief, that the proposed d-RCCA notions are not even relaxations of CCA-2 security. Third, we propose the natural security notions corresponding to the three benchmarks: an appropriately strengthened version of RCCA to ensure confidentiality, as well as two notions for capturing public and secret replay detectability.
2019
TCC
Recent research in quantum cryptography has led to the development of schemes that encrypt and authenticate quantum messages with computational security. The security definitions used so far in the literature are asymptotic, game-based, and not known to be composable. We show how to define finite, composable, computational security for secure quantum message transmission. The new definitions do not involve any games or oracles, they are directly operational: a scheme is secure if it transforms an insecure channel and a shared key into an ideal secure channel from Alice to Bob, i.e., one which only allows Eve to block messages and learn their size, but not change them or read them. By modifying the ideal channel to provide Eve with more or less capabilities, one gets an array of different security notions. By design these transformations are composable, resulting in composable security.Crucially, the new definitions are finite. Security does not rely on the asymptotic hardness of a computational problem. Instead, one proves a finite reduction: if an adversary can distinguish the constructed (real) channel from the ideal one (for some fixed security parameters), then she can solve a finite instance of some computational problem. Such a finite statement is needed to make security claims about concrete implementations.We then prove that (slightly modified versions of) protocols proposed in the literature satisfy these composable definitions. And finally, we study the relations between some game-based definitions and our composable ones. In particular, we look at notions of quantum authenticated encryption and $\mathsf{QCCA2}$, and show that they suffer from the same issues as their classical counterparts: they exclude certain protocols which are arguably secure.
2017
EUROCRYPT
2014
ASIACRYPT