How to fool an unbounded adversary with a short key

The symmetric encryption problem which manifests itself when two parties must securely transmit a message m with a short shared secret key is considered in conjunction with a computationally unbounded adversary. As the adversary is unbounded, any encryption scheme must leak information about m; in particular, the mutual information between m and its ciphertext cannot be zero. Despite this, a family of encryption schemes is presented that guarantee that for any message space in {0,1}/sup n/ with minimum entropy n-/spl lscr/ and for any Boolean function h:{0,1}/sup n/ /spl rarr/ {0,1}, no adversary can predict h(m) from the ciphertext of m with more than 1/n/sup /spl omega/(1)/ advantage; this is achieved with keys of length /spl lscr/+/spl omega/(logn). In general, keys of length /spl lscr/+s yield a bound of 2/sup -/spl Theta/(s)/ on the advantage. These encryption schemes rely on no unproven assumptions and can be implemented efficiently. Applications of this to cryptosystems based on complexity-theoretic assumptions are discussed and, in addition, a simplified proof of a fundamental "elision lemma" of Goldwasser and Micali is provided.