Correctness Amplification of Functional Encryption
- Zehou Wu, University of Waterloo
- Time: 2026-04-28 15:00
- Host: Dr. Tianren Liu
- Venue: Room 204, Courtyard No.5, Jingyuan
Abstract
Many cryptographic primitives are defined to allow non-negligible correctness error. When this error is non-negligibly less than one-half, standard parallel repetition techniques can reduce it to negligible levels. For all-or-nothing type primitives, such as attribute-based encryption, correctness can also be amplified whenever it holds with probability non-negligibly greater than that of uniformly guessing the underlying message. However, these approaches fail in partial-decryption settings, such as functional encryption (FE). In particular, for FE schemes, the best known amplification techniques require correctness to hold with probability non-negligibly greater than one-half. This leaves a large gap when the underlying message space is exponentially large, as is the case with most FE schemes. We present a generic method for boosting correctness across a broad class of FE schemes, provided that base correctness exceeds the probability of randomly guessing the message by a non-negligible margin. Our results apply to a wide range of FE schemes, including those supporting inner products and quadratic functions.
Biography
Zehou Wu is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Prior to that he received a Master’s Degree from University of Victoria. He received his Bachelor’s at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the intersect between cryptography and theoretical computer science.