Abstract
A key-encapsulation mechanism (KEM) is a cryptographic primitive that allows anyone in possession of some party’s public key to securely transmit a key to that party. A KEM can be viewed as a key-exchange protocol in which only a single message is transmitted; the main application is in combination with symmetric encryption to achieve public-key encryption of messages of arbitrary length.
The security of KEMs is usually defined in terms of a certain game that no efficient adversary can win with non-negligible advantage. A main drawback of game-based definitions is that they often do not have clear semantics, and that the security of each higher-level protocol that makes use of KEMs needs to be proved by showing a tailor-made security reduction from breaking the security of the KEM to breaking the security of the combined protocol.
We propose a novel approach to the security and applications of KEMs, following the constructive cryptography paradigm by Maurer and Renner (ICS 2011). The goal of a KEM is to construct a resource that models a shared key available to the honest parties. This resource can be used in designing and proving higher-level protocols; the composition theorem guarantees the security of the combined protocol without the need for a specific reduction.
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Coretti, S., Maurer, U., Tackmann, B. (2013). A Constructive Perspective on Key Encapsulation. In: Fischlin, M., Katzenbeisser, S. (eds) Number Theory and Cryptography. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8260. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-42001-6_16
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