Paper 2015/870

Gambling, Computational Information and Encryption Security

Mohammad Hajiabadi and Bruce M. Kapron

Abstract

We revisit the question, originally posed by Yao (1982), of whether encryption security may be characterized using computational information. Yao provided an affirmative answer, using a compression-based notion of computational information to give a characterization equivalent to the standard computational notion of semantic security. We give two other equivalent characterizations. The first uses a computational formulation of Kelly's (1957) model for "gambling with inside information", leading to an encryption notion which is similar to Yao's but where encrypted data is used by an adversary to place bets maximizing the rate of growth of total wealth over a sequence of independent, identically distributed events. The difficulty of this gambling task is closely related to Vadhan and Zheng's (2011) notion of KL-hardness, which in certain cases is equivalent to a conditional form of the pseudoentropy introduced by Hastad et. al. (1999). Using techniques introduced to prove this equivalence, we are also able to give a characterization of encryption security in terms of conditional pseudoentropy. Finally, we reconsider the gambling model with respect to "risk neutral" adversaries in an attempt to understand whether assumptions about the rationality of adversaries may impact the level of security achieved by an encryption scheme.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. Information Theoretic Security 8th International Conference, ICITS 2015, Lugano, Switzerland, May 2-5, 2015. Proceedings
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-17470-9_9
Keywords
Kelly criterionpseudoentropycomputational informationsemantic securityKelly criterion
Contact author(s)
bmkapron @ uvic ca
History
2015-09-08: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/870
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/870,
      author = {Mohammad Hajiabadi and Bruce M.  Kapron},
      title = {Gambling, Computational Information and Encryption Security},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/870},
      year = {2015},
      doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-17470-9_9},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/870}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/870}
}
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