International Association
for Cryptologic Research

About three decades ago it was realized that implementing private channels between parties which can be adaptively corrupted requires an encryption scheme that is secure against selective opening attacks. Whether standard (IND-CPA) security implies security against selective opening attacks has been a major open question since. The only known reduction from selective opening to IND-CPA security loses an exponential factor. A polynomial reduction is only known for the very special case where the distribution considered in the selective opening security experiment is a product distribution, i.e., the messages are samples independent from each other.

In this paper we give a reduction whose loss is quantified via the dependence graph (where message dependencies correspond to edges) of the underlying message distribution. In particular, for some concrete distributions including Markov distributions, our reduction is polynomial.