Gladius: LWR Based Efficient Hybrid Public Key Encryption with Distributed Decryption

Abstract

Standard hybrid encryption schemes based on the KEMDEM framework are hard to implement efficiently in a distributed manner whilst maintaining the CCA security property of the scheme. This is because the DEM needs to be decrypted under the key encapsulated by the KEM, before the whole ciphertext is declared valid. In this paper we present a new variant of the KEM-DEM framework, closely related to Tag-KEMs, which sidesteps this issue. We then present a postquantum KEM for this framework based on Learning-with-Rounding, which is designed specifically to have fast distributed decryption. Our combined construction of a hybrid encryption scheme with Learningwith-Rounding based KEM, called Gladius, is closely related to the NIST Round 3 candidate called Saber. Finally, we give a prototype distributed implementation that achieves a decapsulation time of 4.99 s for three parties.