Improved, black-box, non-malleable encryption from semantic security

We give a new black-box transformation from any semantically secure encryption scheme into a non-malleable one which has a better rate than the best previous work of Coretti et al. (in: Kushilevitz and Malkin (eds) TCC 2016-A, Part I, Springer, Heidelberg, 2016 ). We achieve a better rate by departing from the “matrix encoding” methodology used by previous constructions, and working directly with a single codeword. We also use a Shamir secret-share packing technique to improve the rate of the underlying error-correcting code.