Universally Composable Symmetric Encryption

For most basic cryptographic tasks, such as public key encryption, digital signatures, authentication, key exchange, and many other more sophisticated tasks, ideal functionalities have been formulated in the simulation-based security approach, along with their realizations. Surprisingly, however, no such functionality exists for symmetric encryption, except for a more abstract Dolev-Yao style functionality. In this paper, the authors fill this gap. They propose two functionalities for symmetric encryption, an unauthenticated and an authenticated version, and show that they can be implemented based on standard cryptographic assumptions for symmetric encryption schemes, namely IND-CCA security and authenticated encryption, respectively.