Standard model (cryptography)

In cryptography the standard model is the model that gives the adversary the strongest powers for attacking the cryptographic scheme at hand. The attacker is only restricted in a complexity theoretic sense, i.e. in the amount of computation he can do in a certain time interval. A polynomially bounded attacker can only do a polynomial amount of computation, and can thus not solve every problem instance of a super-polynomial problem. Exponential time is an important subset of super-polynomial time.

Cryptographic schemes are often based on the assumption that a certain problem, e.g. factorization, is super-polynomial. If such assumptions are the only assumptions made by the scheme, the scheme can be proven secure in the standard model.

See also