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Definition
A security reduction is a particular type of mathematical proof that some cryptographic primitive or protocol is secure, in the sense that it is “at least as difficult to break” as some other problem believed to be hard.
Background
It is usually not possible to prove that a practical cryptographic primitive is secure in an absolute, informational sense, that is, against an adversary with unlimited computational power. For example, an informationally secure encryption scheme must use a key at least as long as the message to be encrypted, and thus, has limited usefulness.
Real adversaries, however, do not have unlimited computational resources. This can be formalized in the language of complexity theory: the complexity of some problems is simply too high for them to be realistically tractable. That is, in particular, one of the insights underlying public key cryptography, as envisioned by Diffie and Hellman in the 1970s [5].
It seemed...
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Tibouchi, M. (2011). Security Reduction. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_515
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_515
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