International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Functional encryption is an emerging paradigm for public-key encryption that enables fine-grained control of access to encrypted data. In this work, we present new perspectives on security definitions for functional encryption, as well as new lower bounds on what can be achieved. Our main contributions are as follows:

* We show a lower bound for functional encryption that satisfies a weak (non-adaptive) simulation-based security notion, via pseudo-random functions. This is the first lower bound that exploits unbounded collusions in an essential way.

* We put forth and discuss a simulation-based notion of security for functional encryption, with an unbounded simulator (called USIM). We show that this notion interpolates indistinguishability and simulation-based security notions, and has strong correlations to results and barriers in the zero-knowledge and multi-party computation literature.