From Cryptomania to Obfustopia Through Secret-Key Functional Encryption

Functional encryption lies at the frontiers of current research in cryptography; some variants have been shown sufficiently powerful to yield indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) while other variants have been constructed from standard assumptions such as LWE. Indeed, most variants have been classified as belonging to either the former or the latter category. However, one mystery that has remained is the case of secret-key functional encryption with an unbounded number of keys and cipher-texts. On the one hand, this primitive is not known to imply anything outside of minicrypt, the land of secret-key crypto, but on the other hand, we do no know how to construct it without the heavy hammers in obfustopia. In this work, we show that (subexponentially secure) secret-key functional encryption is powerful enough to construct indistinguishability obfuscation if we additionally assume the existence of (subexponentially secure) plain public-key encryption. In other words, secret-key functional encryption provides a bridge from cryptomania to obfustopia. On the technical side, our result relies on two main components. As our first contribution, we show how to use secret key functional encryption to get "exponentially- efficient indistinguishability obfuscation" (XIO), a notion recently introduced by Lin et al. (PKC '16) as a relaxation of IO. Lin et al. show how to use XIO and the LWE assumption to build IO. As our second contribution, we improve on this result by replacing its reliance on the LWE assumption with any plain public-key encryption scheme.