Semantically-Secure Functional Encryption: Possibility Results, Impossibility Results and the Quest for a General Definition.
Mihir Bellare, Adam O’Neill · 2012
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