International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Functional encryption is an important generalization of several types of encryption such as public-key, identity-based, and attribute-based encryption. Numerous different security definitions for functional encryption have been proposed, most of them being rather complex and involving several algorithms. Many of these definitions differ in details such as which algorithm has oracle access to which oracle, while the consequences of specific choices are often unclear. This spans a large space of possible definitions without a consensus on the adequacy of specific points in this space. What a particular definition means and for which applications it is suitable remains unsettled.

To remedy this situation, we propose a novel interpretation of functional encryption, based on the Constructive Cryptography framework, in which a protocol is seen as a construction of an ideal resource with desired properties from a real resource, which is assumed to be available. The resulting ideal resource can then be used as a real resource in other protocols to construct more advanced resources. The real resource we consider here corresponds to a public repository that allows everyone to read its contents. Such repositories are indeed widely available on the internet. Using functional encryption, we construct, as the ideal resource, a repository with fine-grained access control.

Based on this constructive viewpoint, we propose a new security definition, called FA-security, for functional encryption by adequately modifying an established definition, and prove the equivalence to our notion of construction. This gives evidence that FA-security is an appropriate definition. We further consider known impossibility results and examine a weaker security definition. We show that this weaker definition, for which secure schemes exist, is sufficient to construct a repository that restricts the number and order of interactions. This makes explicit how such schemes can be used.