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by dandanua 27 days ago
The paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1296
1 comments

I can't even tell if this is tangent or central to the main idea, but I'm so intrigued by this one part:

> at the relatively mild cost that such applications now have security that is "game-based" instead of "simulation-based."

Quite interesting and mysterious. What is a game but a kind of simulation with two or more potentially competing "physics engines" involved? What is a simulation but a game, where exactly one player happens to be called "The Environment"? If these aren't two ways of looking at the same thing, what's this about a relatively mild cost?

The author didn’t use those words “just because”. Game-based security and simulation-based security are two different styles of security definitions used in cryptography, and we differentiate between them for good reason: game-based definitions are typically weaker (in that they capture less adversary behaviour) than simulation-based definitions.

Also, they have nothing to do with “video games” or physical simulations therein.

Thanks for the hint. Reading more about this, it seems the crypto/zero-knowledge/interactive-proof terminology is formal but overloaded here.. games that have nothing to do with game-theory, simulation that has no connection with bisimulation