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International Workshop on Public Key Cryptography

PKC 1998: Public Key Cryptography pp 117–134Cite as

On the security of ElGamal based encryption

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1431))

Abstract

The ElGamal encryption scheme has been proposed several years ago and is one of the few probabilistic encryption schemes. However, its security has never been concretely proven based on clearly understood and accepted primitives. Here we show directly that the decision Diffie-Hellman assumption implies the security of the original ElGamal encryption scheme (with messages from a subgroup) without modification. In addition, we show that the opposite direction holds, i.e., the semantic security of the ElGamal encryption is actually equivalent to the decision Diffie-Hellman problem. We also present an exact analysis of the efficiency of the reduction.

Next we present additions on ElGamal encryption which result in non-malleability under adaptive chosen plaintext attacks. Non-malleability is equivalent to the decision Diffie-Hellman assumption, the existence of a random oracle (in practice a secure hash function) or a trusted beacon (as needed for the Fiat-Shamir argument), and one assumption about the unforgeability of Schnorr signatures. Our proof employs the tool of message awareness.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GTE Laboratories Inc., Waltham, MA

    Yiannis Tsiounis

  2. CertCo, NY, NY

    Moti Yung

Authors
  1. Yiannis Tsiounis
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  2. Moti Yung
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Editor information

Hideki Imai Yuliang Zheng

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Tsiounis, Y., Yung, M. (1998). On the security of ElGamal based encryption. In: Imai, H., Zheng, Y. (eds) Public Key Cryptography. PKC 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1431. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054019

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054019

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64693-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69105-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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