A Designers Guide to KEMs

A generic or KEM-DEM hybrid construction is a formal method of combining a asymmetric and symmetric encryption techniques to give an efficient, provably secure public-key encryption scheme. This method combines an asymmetric KEM with a symmetric DEM, and each of these components must satisfy their own security conditions. In this paper we describe generic constructions for provably secure KEMs based on lower level primitives such as one-way trapdoor functions and weak key-agreement protocols.