We show that concealments have natural and important applications in the area of
authenticated encryption. Specifically, let
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
be an authenticated encryption scheme (either public- or symmetric-key) designed to work on short messages. We show that concealments
are
exactly the right abstraction allowing one to use
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
for encrypting long messages. Namely, to encrypt “long”
m, one uses a concealment scheme to get
h and
b, and outputs authenticated ciphertext
$
\left\langle {\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}(b),h} \right\rangle
$
\left\langle {\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}(b),h} \right\rangle
. More surprisingly, the above paradigm leads to a very simple and general solution to the problem of
remotely keyed (authenticated) encryption (RKAE) [[
12],[
13]]. In this problem, one wishes to split the task of high-bandwidth authenticated encryption between a secure, but low-bandwidth/computationally
limited device, and an insecure, but computationally powerful host. We give formal definitions for RKAE, which we believe
are simpler and more natural than all the previous definitions. We then show that our composition paradigm satisfies our (very
strong) definition. Namely, for authenticated encryption, the host simply sends a short value
b to the device (which stores the actual secret key for
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
, gets back
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
$
\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}
(
b)
, and outputs
$
\left\langle {\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}(b),h} \right\rangle
$
\left\langle {\mathcal{A}\mathcal{E}(b),h} \right\rangle
(authenticated decryption is similar). Finally, we also observe that the particular schemes of [[
13],[
17]] are all special examples of our general paradigm.