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Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Semantic security is a widely used definition for security in an asymmetric key encryption algorithm. For a cryptosystem to be semantically secure, it must be infeasible for a computationally bounded adversary to derive significant information about a message (plaintext) when given only its ciphertext and the corresponding public encryption key. Semantic security considers only the case of a "passive" attacker, i.e., one who generates and observes ciphertexts using the public key and plaintexts of her choice. Unlike other security definitions, semantic security does not consider the case of chosen ciphertext attack (CCA), where an attacker is able to request the decryption of chosen ciphertexts, and many semantically-secure encryption schemes are demonstrably insecure against chosen ciphertext attack. Consequently, semantic security is now considered an insufficient condition for securing a general-purpose encryption scheme.
