On the Relation Between the Ideal Cipher and the Random Oracle Models

The Random Oracle Model and the Ideal Cipher Model are two of the most popular idealized models in cryptography. It is a fundamentally important practical and theoretical problem to compare the relative strengths of these models and to see how they relate to each other. Recently, Coron et al. [8] proved that one can securely instantiate a random oracle in the ideal cipher model. In this paper, we investigate if it is possible to instantiate an ideal block cipher in the random oracle model, which is a considerably more challenging question. We conjecture that the Luby-Rackoff construction [19] with a sufficient number of rounds should suffice to show this implication. This does not follow from the famous Luby-Rackoff result [19] showing that 4 rounds are enough to turn a pseudorandom function into a pseudorandom permutation, since the results of the intermediate rounds are known to everybody. As a partial step toward resolving this conjecture, we show that random oracles imply ideal ciphers in the honest-but-curious model, where all the participants are assumed to follow the protocol, but keep all their intermediate results. Namely, we show that the Luby-Rackoff construction with a superlogarithmic number of rounds can be used to instantiate the ideal block cipher in any honest-but-curious cryptosystem, and result in a similar honest-but-curious cryptosystem in the random oracle model. We also show that securely instantiating the ideal cipher using the Luby Rackoff construction with upto a logarithmic number of rounds is equivalent in the honest-but-curious and malicious models.