On the Security of Padding-Based Encryption Schemes - or - Why We Cannot Prove OAEP Secure in the Standard Model

We investigate the security of “padding-based” encryption schemes in the standard model . This class contains all public-key encryption schemes where the encryption algorithm first applies some invertible public transformation to the message (the “padding”), followed by a trapdoor permutation. In particular, this class contains OAEP and its variants. Our main result is a black-box impossibility result showing that one cannot prove any such padding-based scheme chosen-ciphertext secure even assuming the existence of ideal trapdoor permutations. The latter is a strong ideal abstraction of trapdoor permutations which inherits all security properties of uniform random permutations.