IACR News item: 07 July 2025
Fuyuki Kitagawa, Takashi Yamakawa
ePrint Report
Single decryptor encryption (SDE) is public key encryption (PKE) where the decryption key is an unclonable quantum state. Coladangelo, Liu, Liu, and Zhandry (CRYPTO 2021) realized the first SDE assuming subexponentially secure indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) and one-way functions (OWFs), along with the polynomial hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. Since then, SDE has played a pivotal role in recent advances in quantum cryptography. However, despite its central importance in unclonable cryptography, many fundamental questions about SDE remain unanswered. For example, a line of works has proposed various security notions for SDE, but their relationships have hardly been discussed. Moreover, while many subsequent works have adopted the construction methodology of Coladangelo et al., none have explored its improvement, leaving the possibility of a more efficient approach to SDE.
In this work, we address these fundamental questions concerning SDE. Our contributions are threefold.
New security notion: We introduce a strengthened indistinguishability-based security notion for SDE, which we call CPA+ anti-piracy security. We show that CPA+ security unifies the existing security notions for SDE, as detailed in the third item.
New construction: We present an SDE scheme that satisfies CPA+ anti-piracy security, based solely on polynomially secure iO and OWFs. In addition to relying on weaker and more general assumptions, our SDE scheme offers a significant advantage over the scheme of Coladangelo et al., as both the construction and its security proof are much simpler.
Relationships among security notions: We demonstrate that CPA+ anti-piracy security implies all existing security notions for SDE, with the sole exception of identical challenge ciphertext security proposed by Georgiou and Zhandry (EPRINT 2020). Although we do not establish a direct implication from CPA+ anti-piracy security to identical challenge ciphertext security, we provide a generic transformation from an SDE scheme satisfying the former to one achieving the latter in the quantum random oracle model. Additionally, we establish various relationships among different security notions for SDE. By combining these results with our SDE construction, we derive several new feasibility results.
In this work, we address these fundamental questions concerning SDE. Our contributions are threefold.
New security notion: We introduce a strengthened indistinguishability-based security notion for SDE, which we call CPA+ anti-piracy security. We show that CPA+ security unifies the existing security notions for SDE, as detailed in the third item.
New construction: We present an SDE scheme that satisfies CPA+ anti-piracy security, based solely on polynomially secure iO and OWFs. In addition to relying on weaker and more general assumptions, our SDE scheme offers a significant advantage over the scheme of Coladangelo et al., as both the construction and its security proof are much simpler.
Relationships among security notions: We demonstrate that CPA+ anti-piracy security implies all existing security notions for SDE, with the sole exception of identical challenge ciphertext security proposed by Georgiou and Zhandry (EPRINT 2020). Although we do not establish a direct implication from CPA+ anti-piracy security to identical challenge ciphertext security, we provide a generic transformation from an SDE scheme satisfying the former to one achieving the latter in the quantum random oracle model. Additionally, we establish various relationships among different security notions for SDE. By combining these results with our SDE construction, we derive several new feasibility results.
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