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On the Power of Rewinding Simulators in Functional Encryption.

Angelo De, Vincenzo Iovino

Published Jan 1, 2013• 3 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

In the recent years, functional encryption (FE) has received a lot of attention due to its versatility and unique challenges it poses. In FE, a receiver with secret-key sky can com-pute from an encryption of x the value F (y, x) for some functionality F. The seminal work of Boneh, Sahai and Waters [TCC’11] showed that for functional encryption the indistin-guishability notion of security (IND-Security) is weaker then simulation-based and, moreover, showed that simulation-based security is impossible to achieve even in weaker settings. This has opened up the door to a plethora of papers, showing feasibility and new impossibility re-sults, having in common the pursuit of a reasonable and achievable simulation-based security definition. With the same aim, in this work, we propose a new simulation-based security definition that we call rewinding simulation-based security (RSIM-Security). Rewinding arguments have been used in all sorts of interactive protocols and have been shown to be highly useful to argue security. We exploit this power allowing the simulator to rewind the adversary under specific constraints. Specifically, the simulator will be able to rewind the adversary

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One of the main lines of research in functional encryption (FE) has consisted in studying the security notions for FE and their achievability. This study was initiated by [Boneh et al. { TCC’11, O’Neill { ePrint’10] where it was rst shown that for FE the indistinguishabilitybased (IND) security notion is not sucient in the sense that there are FE schemes that are provably IND-Secure but concretely insecure. For this reason, researchers investigated the achievability of Simulation-based (SIM) security, a stronger notion of security. Unfortunately, the above-mentioned works and others [e.g., Agrawal et al. { CRYPTO’13] have shown strong impossibility results for SIM-Security. One way to overcome these impossibility results was rst

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On the Feasibility of Simulation-Secure Quantum Functional Encryption

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Functional encryption is a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables fine-grained access to encrypted data and underlies numerous applications. Although the ideal security notion for FE, simulation security, has been shown to be impossible in the plain classical setting, those impossibility results rely on inherently classical arguments. This raises a fundamental question: can simulation-secure FE be realized in the quantum regime or in alternative models? We resolve both directions of this question. On the negative side, we show that the classical impossibility results largely extend to the quantum setting. When the adversary can submit an unbounded number of challenge messages, we establish an unconditional impossibility, matching the classical barrier. In the case where the adversary may obtain many functional keys, classical arguments only yield impossibility under the assumption of pseudorandom functions; we strengthen this by proving impossibility under the potentially weaker assumption of pseudorandom quantum states. We additionally give an independent impossibility based solely on public-key encryption with classical public-keys. Since public-key encryption is not known to imply pseudorandom states, this yields complementary evidence of the barrier and, in particular, establishes unconditional impossibility of public-key functional encryption with classical public-keys. A key technical ingredient in our proofs is a novel incompressibility property for pseudorandom states, which may be of independent interest. On the positive side, we show how to circumvent these fundamental barriers in memory-restricted models, where the adversary's quantum or classical memory is bounded. In this setting, we obtain new feasibility results for simulation-secure FE that allow many challenge ciphertexts or many functional key queries.

cs.CRCross-listedarXiv:2601.17497•Jan 27, 2026•0 citations

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This paper explains that SS1-secure functional encryption (FE) as defined by Boneh, Sahai and Waters implicitly incorporates security under key-revealing selective opening attacks (SOA-K). This connection helps intuitively explain their impossibility results and also allows us to prove stronger ones. To fill this gap and move us closer to the (laudable) goal of a general and achievable notion of FE security, we seek and provide two “sans SOA-K ” definitions of FE security that we call SS2 and SS3. We prove various possibility results about these definitions. We view our work as a first step towards the challenging goal of a general, meaningful and achievable notion of FE security. 1

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This work furthers the exploration of meaningful definitions for security of Functional Encryption. We propose new simulation based definitions for function privacy in addition to data privacy and study their achievability. In addition, we improve efficiency/ underlying assumptions/ security achieved by existing inner product Functional Encryption and Property Preserving Encryption schemes, in both the private and public key setting. Our results can be summarized as follows: • We present a new simulation based definition, which we call Relax-AD-SIM, that lies between simulation based (SIM) and indistinguishability based (IND) definitions for data privacy, and implies the function privacy definition of [BRS13a]. Our definition relaxes the requirements on the simulator to bypass impossibility of SIM in the standard model. We show that the inner product FE scheme of [KSW08] enjoys Relax-AD-SIM security for function hiding and the inner product FE scheme of [LOS10] enjoys Relax-AD-SIM security for data hiding. • We study whether known impossibilities for achieving strong SIM based security imply actual real world attacks. For this, we present a new UC-style SIM based definition of security that captures both data and function hiding, both public key and symmetric key settings and represents the “dream” security of FE. While known impossibilities rule out its achievability in the standard model, we show, surprisingly, that it can be achieved in the generic group model for Inner Product FE ([KSW08]). This provides evidence that FE implementations may enjoy extremely strong security against a large class of real world attacks, namely generic attacks. It also implies a program obfuscator for the inner product functionality in the generic group model, which is related to the hyperplane-membership obfuscator of [CRV10]. • We provide several improvements to known constructions of Inner Product FE. In the private key setting, the construction by Shen et al. was based on non-standard assumptions, used composite order groups, and only achieved selective security. We give the first construction of a symmetric key inner product FE which is built using prime order groups, and is fully secure under the standard DLIN assumption. Our scheme is more efficient in the size of key and ciphertext than [SSW09], when the latter is converted to prime-order groups. We also port the public key inner product scheme of [KSW08] to prime order groups. • We give the first standard model construction of a property preserving encryption (PPE) scheme [PR12] for inner-products. Our scheme is secure under the DLIN assumption and satisfies the strongest definition of security – Left-or-Right security. Note that previously known constructions were only known to be secure in the generic group model. ∗UIUC. Email: sagrawl2@illinois.edu. †I.I.T, Delhi. Email: shweta.a@gmail.com. ‡UIUC. Email: bsaikrishna7393@gmail.com. §UCLA Email: abishekk@cs.ucla.edu. ¶UIUC. Email: manojmp@gmail.com. ‖UCLA Email: sahai@cs.ucla.edu.

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Functional encryption (FE) is a versatile paradigm that enables fine-grained access control over encrypted data. Despite its potential, achieving the gold standard of simulation-based security for FE is impossible in full generality. Known impossibility results demonstrate that simulation security cannot be attained if an adversary in the security experiment is permitted either an unbounded number of functional key queries or an unbounded number of challenge ciphertexts. In this work, we circumvent these fundamental barriers by considering two distinct memory-restricted settings: the Bounded Quantum Storage Model and the Bounded Classical Storage Model. In these settings, the plain model impossibility results no longer apply, allowing us to obtain new positive results. Specifically, we construct two adaptively simulation-secure FE schemes in the Bounded Quantum Storage Model: 1) Many functional key scheme: A construction supporting many functional key queries and a single challenge ciphertext, assuming only the existence of one-way functions. 2) Many ciphertext scheme: An information-theoretic secure construction supporting a single non-adaptive functional key, many challenge ciphertexts, and many adaptive functional key queries. Furthermore, we demonstrate that both schemes can be ported to the Bounded Classical Storage Model, assuming the existence of disappearing grey-box obfuscation.

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Abstract. Functional encryption (FE) is a powerful cryptographic primitive that generalizes many asymmetric encryption systems proposed in recent years. Syntax and security definitions for general FE were recently proposed by Boneh, Sahai, and Waters (BSW) (TCC 2011) and independently by O’Neill (ePrint 2010/556). In this paper we revisit these definitions, identify several shortcomings in them, and propose a new definitional approach that overcomes these limitations. Our definitions display good compositionality properties and allow us to obtain new feasibility and impossibility results for adaptive token-extraction attack scenarios that shed further light on the potential reach of general FE for practical applications. The main contributions of the paper are the following: – We show that the BSW definition of semantic security fails to reject intuitively insecure FE schemes where a ciphertext leaks more about an encrypted message than that which can be recovered from an image under the supported functionality. Our definition (as O’Neill’s) does not suffer from this problem. – We introduce an orthogonal notion of setup security that rejects all FE schemes where the master secret key may give unwanted power to the TA, allowing the recovery of extra information from images under the supported functionality. We prove FE schemes supporting all-or-nothing functionalities are intrinsically setup-secure and further show that many well-known functionalities are all-or-nothing.

•Jan 1, 2012•1 citation
In the recent years, functional encryption (FE) has received a lot of attention due to its versatility and unique challenges it poses. In FE, a receiver with secret-key sky can com-pute from an encryption of x the value F (y, x) for some functionality F. The seminal work of Boneh, Sahai and Waters [TCC’11] showed that for functional encryption the indistin-guishability notion of security (IND-Security) is weaker then simulation-based and, moreover, showed that simulation-based security is impossible to achieve even in weaker settings. This has opened up the door to a plethora of papers, showing feasibility and new impossibility re-sults, having in common the pursuit of a reasonable and achievable simulation-based security definition. With the same aim, in this work, we propose a new simulation-based security definition that we call rewinding simulation-based security (RSIM-Security). Rewinding arguments have been used in all sorts of interactive protocols and have been shown to be highly useful to argue security. We exploit this power allowing the simulator to rewind the adversary under specific constraints. Specifically, the simulator will be able to rewind the adversary
One of the main lines of research in functional encryption (FE) has consisted in studying the security notions for FE and their achievability. This study was initiated by [Boneh et al. { TCC’11, O’Neill { ePrint’10] where it was rst shown that for FE the indistinguishabilitybased (IND) security notion is not sucient in the sense that there are FE schemes that are provably IND-Secure but concretely insecure. For this reason, researchers investigated the achievability of Simulation-based (SIM) security, a stronger notion of security. Unfortunately, the above-mentioned works and others [e.g., Agrawal et al. { CRYPTO’13] have shown strong impossibility results for SIM-Security. One way to overcome these impossibility results was rst
Functional encryption is a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables fine-grained access to encrypted data and underlies numerous applications. Although the ideal security notion for FE, simulation security, has been shown to be impossible in the plain classical setting, those impossibility results rely on inherently classical arguments. This raises a fundamental question: can simulation-secure FE be realized in the quantum regime or in alternative models? We resolve both directions of this question. On the negative side, we show that the classical impossibility results largely extend to the quantum setting. When the adversary can submit an unbounded number of challenge messages, we establish an unconditional impossibility, matching the classical barrier. In the case where the adversary may obtain many functional keys, classical arguments only yield impossibility under the assumption of pseudorandom functions; we strengthen this by proving impossibility under the potentially weaker assumption of pseudorandom quantum states. We additionally give an independent impossibility based solely on public-key encryption with classical public-keys. Since public-key encryption is not known to imply pseudorandom states, this yields complementary evidence of the barrier and, in particular, establishes unconditional impossibility of public-key functional encryption with classical public-keys. A key technical ingredient in our proofs is a novel incompressibility property for pseudorandom states, which may be of independent interest. On the positive side, we show how to circumvent these fundamental barriers in memory-restricted models, where the adversary's quantum or classical memory is bounded. In this setting, we obtain new feasibility results for simulation-secure FE that allow many challenge ciphertexts or many functional key queries.
This paper explains that SS1-secure functional encryption (FE) as defined by Boneh, Sahai and Waters implicitly incorporates security under key-revealing selective opening attacks (SOA-K). This connection helps intuitively explain their impossibility results and also allows us to prove stronger ones. To fill this gap and move us closer to the (laudable) goal of a general and achievable notion of FE security, we seek and provide two “sans SOA-K ” definitions of FE security that we call SS2 and SS3. We prove various possibility results about these definitions. We view our work as a first step towards the challenging goal of a general, meaningful and achievable notion of FE security. 1
This work furthers the exploration of meaningful definitions for security of Functional Encryption. We propose new simulation based definitions for function privacy in addition to data privacy and study their achievability. In addition, we improve efficiency/ underlying assumptions/ security achieved by existing inner product Functional Encryption and Property Preserving Encryption schemes, in both the private and public key setting. Our results can be summarized as follows: • We present a new simulation based definition, which we call Relax-AD-SIM, that lies between simulation based (SIM) and indistinguishability based (IND) definitions for data privacy, and implies the function privacy definition of [BRS13a]. Our definition relaxes the requirements on the simulator to bypass impossibility of SIM in the standard model. We show that the inner product FE scheme of [KSW08] enjoys Relax-AD-SIM security for function hiding and the inner product FE scheme of [LOS10] enjoys Relax-AD-SIM security for data hiding. • We study whether known impossibilities for achieving strong SIM based security imply actual real world attacks. For this, we present a new UC-style SIM based definition of security that captures both data and function hiding, both public key and symmetric key settings and represents the “dream” security of FE. While known impossibilities rule out its achievability in the standard model, we show, surprisingly, that it can be achieved in the generic group model for Inner Product FE ([KSW08]). This provides evidence that FE implementations may enjoy extremely strong security against a large class of real world attacks, namely generic attacks. It also implies a program obfuscator for the inner product functionality in the generic group model, which is related to the hyperplane-membership obfuscator of [CRV10]. • We provide several improvements to known constructions of Inner Product FE. In the private key setting, the construction by Shen et al. was based on non-standard assumptions, used composite order groups, and only achieved selective security. We give the first construction of a symmetric key inner product FE which is built using prime order groups, and is fully secure under the standard DLIN assumption. Our scheme is more efficient in the size of key and ciphertext than [SSW09], when the latter is converted to prime-order groups. We also port the public key inner product scheme of [KSW08] to prime order groups. • We give the first standard model construction of a property preserving encryption (PPE) scheme [PR12] for inner-products. Our scheme is secure under the DLIN assumption and satisfies the strongest definition of security – Left-or-Right security. Note that previously known constructions were only known to be secure in the generic group model. ∗UIUC. Email: sagrawl2@illinois.edu. †I.I.T, Delhi. Email: shweta.a@gmail.com. ‡UIUC. Email: bsaikrishna7393@gmail.com. §UCLA Email: abishekk@cs.ucla.edu. ¶UIUC. Email: manojmp@gmail.com. ‖UCLA Email: sahai@cs.ucla.edu.
Functional encryption (FE) is a versatile paradigm that enables fine-grained access control over encrypted data. Despite its potential, achieving the gold standard of simulation-based security for FE is impossible in full generality. Known impossibility results demonstrate that simulation security cannot be attained if an adversary in the security experiment is permitted either an unbounded number of functional key queries or an unbounded number of challenge ciphertexts. In this work, we circumvent these fundamental barriers by considering two distinct memory-restricted settings: the Bounded Quantum Storage Model and the Bounded Classical Storage Model. In these settings, the plain model impossibility results no longer apply, allowing us to obtain new positive results. Specifically, we construct two adaptively simulation-secure FE schemes in the Bounded Quantum Storage Model: 1) Many functional key scheme: A construction supporting many functional key queries and a single challenge ciphertext, assuming only the existence of one-way functions. 2) Many ciphertext scheme: An information-theoretic secure construction supporting a single non-adaptive functional key, many challenge ciphertexts, and many adaptive functional key queries. Furthermore, we demonstrate that both schemes can be ported to the Bounded Classical Storage Model, assuming the existence of disappearing grey-box obfuscation.
Abstract. Functional encryption (FE) is a powerful cryptographic primitive that generalizes many asymmetric encryption systems proposed in recent years. Syntax and security definitions for general FE were recently proposed by Boneh, Sahai, and Waters (BSW) (TCC 2011) and independently by O’Neill (ePrint 2010/556). In this paper we revisit these definitions, identify several shortcomings in them, and propose a new definitional approach that overcomes these limitations. Our definitions display good compositionality properties and allow us to obtain new feasibility and impossibility results for adaptive token-extraction attack scenarios that shed further light on the potential reach of general FE for practical applications. The main contributions of the paper are the following: – We show that the BSW definition of semantic security fails to reject intuitively insecure FE schemes where a ciphertext leaks more about an encrypted message than that which can be recovered from an image under the supported functionality. Our definition (as O’Neill’s) does not suffer from this problem. – We introduce an orthogonal notion of setup security that rejects all FE schemes where the master secret key may give unwanted power to the TA, allowing the recovery of extra information from images under the supported functionality. We prove FE schemes supporting all-or-nothing functionalities are intrinsically setup-secure and further show that many well-known functionalities are all-or-nothing.