IACR News item: 26 September 2026
Haijie Su, Haibo Cheng, Ping Wang
Distribution-aware encryption seeks guarantees tailored to the probability
law of the protected data and the secret key. We study simultaneous
message-recovery, key-recovery, and target-distribution semantic security
for arbitrary finite joint distributions, without assuming that messages
and keys are independent. We represent encryption by a decomposition of
the joint probability matrix and construct this decomposition through
capacity-controlled randomized rounding. A stepwise conditional sampler
turns the rounding process into a correct encryption algorithm without
enumerating its output distribution or rejecting complete samples.
Let $p_\star$ and $q_\star$ be the largest message and key probabilities.
Our construction attains the exact message-recovery optimum
$\max\{p_\star,q_\star\}$, has key-recovery success below $2q_\star$, and
provides $O(\sqrt{q_\star})$ advantage against prediction of every fixed
Boolean message predicate. The semantic guarantee follows from negative
correlation of the binary row-rounding remainders.
We prove that the key-recovery factor cannot be uniformly improved while
preserving exact message-recovery optimality, and that the semantic
bound has the optimal worst-case order. We also establish additive
robustness under distribution error and short-ciphertext existence by
preserving only the moments needed for the security proof. The general
sampler runs in expected polynomial time in the explicit rational input size; short
ciphertexts do not by themselves imply efficient preprocessing or
compact public descriptions. Structured sources admit additional
efficient implementations.
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