Unclonable Encryption, Revisited

TL;DR

This paper revisits unclonable encryption, presenting new constructions with semantic security, analyzing their security bounds, and exploring implications for copy-protection, thus advancing understanding of quantum cryptographic schemes.

Contribution

The paper introduces semantic security for unclonable encryption, generalizes security bounds, and links unclonable encryption to copy-protection, providing new cryptographic insights.

Findings

Constructed semantic secure unclonable encryption schemes from minimal assumptions.

Demonstrated a cloning attack with success probability 0.71^n against certain schemes.

Showed unclonable-indistinguishability implies copy-protection for unlearnable functions.

Abstract

Unclonable encryption, introduced by Broadbent and Lord (TQC'20), is an encryption scheme with the following attractive feature: given a ciphertext, an adversary cannot create two ciphertexts both of which decrypt to the same message as the original ciphertext. We revisit this notion and show the following: - Reusability: The constructions proposed by Broadbent and Lord have the disadvantage that they either guarantee one-time security (that is, the encryption key can only be used once to encrypt the message) in the plain model or they guaranteed security in the random oracle model. We construct unclonable encryption schemes with semantic security. We present two constructions (for public-key and private-key settings) from minimal cryptographic assumptions. - Lower Bound and Generalized Construction: We revisit the information-theoretic one-time secure construction of Broadbent and Lord. The success probability of the adversary in their construction was guaranteed to be $0.85^n$, where $n$ is the length of the message. It was interesting to understand whether the ideal success probability of (negligibly close to) $0.5^n$ was unattainable. We generalize their construction to be based on a broader class of monogamy of entanglement games. We demonstrate a simple cloning attack that succeeds with probability $0.71^n$ against a class of schemes including that of Broadbent and Lord. We also present a $0.75^n$ cloning attack exclusively against their scheme. - Implication to Copy-Protection: We show that unclonable encryption, satisfying a stronger property, called unclonable-indistinguishability (defined by Broadbent and Lord), implies copy-protection for a simple class of unlearnable functions. While we currently don't have encryption schemes satisfying this stronger property, this implication demonstrates a new path to construct copy-protection.