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FOCS 1979

Relativized Cryptography

Conference Paper Session VI Algorithms and Complexity · Theoretical Computer Science

Abstract

It seems very difficult to give a formal definition of computational security for Public Key Cryptography. We define a slightly different notion, called Transient-Key Cryptography, for which a natural definition of security against chosen-plaintext-attacks can be given. The main result presented here is the existence of a relativized model of computation under which there exists a provably secure transientkey cryptosystem. Indeed, there exists a computable oracle that can be used by cryptographers to efficiently encipher and decipher messages, yet it is of no help to the cryptanalyst trying to decode messages not intended for him. As a corollary, there exists a length-preserving permutation, the inverse of which is hard to compute on most elements of its domain even if arbitrary evaluations of the function itself are allowed for free.

Authors

Keywords

  • Public key cryptography
  • Computational complexity
  • Information security
  • Decoding
  • Art
  • Computational modeling
  • Delay
  • Communication system security
  • Public key
  • Distributed computing
  • Computational Model
  • Multi-party Computation
  • Security Proof
  • Definition Of Security
  • Standard Model
  • Encryption
  • Secret Key
  • Binary String
  • Secure Communication
  • Secure Channel
  • Message Length
  • Random String
  • Cryptanalysis
  • Shannon’s Information Theory

Context

Venue
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Archive span
1975-2025
Indexed papers
3809
Paper id
463309205165595115
v2026.09.13