International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)
Abstract
For most basic cryptographic tasks, such as public key
encryption, digital signatures, authentication, key
exchange, and many other more sophisticated tasks, ideal
functionalities have been formulated in the
simulation-based security approach, along with their
realizations. Surprisingly, however, no such functionality
exists for symmetric encryption, except for a more abstract
Dolev-Yao style functionality. In this paper, we fill this
gap. We propose two functionalities for symmetric
encryption, an unauthenticated and an authenticated
version, and show that they can be implemented based on
standard cryptographic assumptions for symmetric encryption
schemes, namely IND-CCA security and authenticated
encryption, respectively. We also illustrate the usefulness
of our functionalities in applications, both in
simulation-based and game-based security settings