Adaptive Distributional Security A Framework for Input-Adaptive Cryptography

It is often desirable to break cryptographic primitives into two components: an input-independent offline component, and a cheap online component used when inputs arrive. Security of such online/offline primitives must be proved in the input-adaptive setting: the adversary chooses its input adaptively, based on what it sees in the offline phase. Proving security in the input-adaptive setting can be difficult, particularly when one wishes to achieve simulation security and avoid idealized objects like a random oracle (RO).

This work proposes a framework for reasoning about input-adaptive primitives: adaptive distributional security (ADS). Roughly, an ADS primitive provides security when it is used with inputs drawn from one of two distributions that are themselves hard to distinguish. ADS is useful as a framework for the following reasons:

- An ADS definition can often circumvent impossibility results imposed on the corresponding simulation-based definition. This allows us to decrease the online-cost of primitives, albeit by using a weaker notion of security.

- With care, one can typically upgrade an ADS-secure object into a simulation-secure object (by increasing cost in the online phase).

- Many useful ADS-secure objects are plausibly secure from symmetric-key cryptography.

We use our framework to define a family of ADS-secure primitives, culminating in a 2PC protocol with a lightweight online phase.