International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Semi-adaptive security is a notion of security that lies between selective and adaptive security for Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Functional Encryption (FE) systems. In the semi-adaptive model the attacker is forced to disclose the challenge messages before it makes any key queries, but is allowed to see the public parameters.

We show how to generically transform any selectively secure ABE or FE scheme into one that is semi-adaptively secure with the only additional assumption being public key encryption, which is already naturally included in almost any scheme of interest. Our technique utilizes a fairly simple application of garbled circuits where instead of encrypting directly, the encryptor creates a garbled circuit that takes as input the public parameters and outputs a ciphertext in the underlying selective scheme. Essentially, the encryption algorithm encrypts without knowing the `real' public parameters. This allows one to delay giving out the underlying selective parameters until a private key is issued, which connects the semi-adaptive to selective security. The methods used to achieve this result suggest that the moral gap between selective and semi-adaptive security is in general much smaller than that between semi-adaptive and full security.

Finally, we show how to extend the above idea to generically bundle a family of functionalities under one set of public parameters. For example, suppose we had an inner product predicate encryption scheme where the length of the vectors was specified at setup and therefore fixed to the public parameters. Using our transformation one could create a system where for a single set of public parameters the vector length is not apriori bounded, but instead is specified by the encryption algorithm. The resulting ciphertext would be compatible with any private key generated to work on the same input length.