Cryptography is an indispensable aspect of our daily lives. From securing online banking and protecting personal information to enabling secure connections over the Internet and protecting critical infrastructures, it permeates every fiber of our modern society. Understanding the security guarantees of these cryptographic schemes is crucial to ensuring their effectiveness in the real world.The theoretical foundation of modern cryptography was laid in a seminal work by Goldwasser and Micali in 1984. Their pioneering work applied well-established techniques from theoretical computer science to conduct a formal security analysis of a cryptographic scheme, allowing for the first time a precise analysis of the security guarantees achieved by a cryptographic scheme. This approach is today called the provable security paradigm. Nowadays, it is considered good practice to not only propose a new cryptographic scheme, but also to present a security proof, ensuring a rigorous analysis of its security guarantees. However, despite the theoretical rigor of provable security, challenges still persist in applying its principles to real-world cryptographic schemes. The idealized nature of security models, which often make assumptions about how adversaries may attack a cryptographic scheme, can diverge from the complexities of the real world. While these idealizations help to build a universal theory of secure cryptography, the real-world meaningfulness of security proofs diminishes when they fail to accurately model the real world.This thesis explores the gap between the idealized treatment of security in cryptography and its real-world applications. The overarching goal is to advance our comprehension of theoretically-sound real-world cryptography, addressing foundational research questions that aim to further bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Kai Gellert (Tue,) studied this question.