Recently, Bellare and Palacio defined the plaintext awareness (PA-ness) in the standard model. In this paper, we study the relationship between the standard model PA-ness and the property about message hiding, that is, IND-CPA. Although these two notions seem to be independent at first glance, we show that PA-ness in the standard model implies the IND-CPA security if the encryption function is oneway. By using this result, we also showed that "PA + Oneway ⇒ IND-CCA2." We also show that the computational PA-ness notion is strictly stronger than the statistical one.

We propose a new security class, called plaintext simulatability, defined over the public-key encryption schemes. The notion of plaintext simulatability (denoted PS) is similar to the notion of plaintext awareness (denoted PA) defined in [3], but it is "properly" a weaker security class for public-key encryption. It is known that PA implies the class of CCA2-secure encryption (denoted IND-CCA2) but not vice versa. In most cases, PA is "unnecessarily" strong--In such cases, PA is only used to study that the public-key encryption scheme involved meets IND-CCA2, because it looks much easier to treat the membership of PA than to do "directly" the membership of IND-CCA2. We show that PS also implies IND-CCA2, while preserving such a technical advantage as well as PA. We present two novel CCA2-secure public-key encryption schemes, which should have been provided with more complicated security analyses. One is a random-oracle version of Dolev-Dwork-Naor's encryption scheme [8],[9]. Unlike the original scheme, this construction is efficient. The other is a public-key encryption scheme based on a strong pseudo-random permutation family [16] which provides the optimal ciphertext lengths for verifying the validity of ciphertexts, i.e., (ciphertext size) = (message size) + (randomness size). According to [19], such a construction remains open. Both schemes meet PS but not PA.