  At CRYPTO 2013, Boneh and Zhandry initiated the study of quantum-secure
encryption. They proposed first indistinguishability definitions for the
quantum world where the actual indistinguishability only holds for classical
messages, and they provide arguments why it might be hard to achieve a stronger
notion. In this work, we show that stronger notions are achievable, where the
indistinguishability holds for quantum superpositions of messages. We
investigate exhaustively the possibilities and subtle differences in defining
such a quantum indistinguishability notion for symmetric-key encryption
schemes. We justify our stronger definition by showing its equivalence to novel
quantum semantic-security notions that we introduce. Furthermore, we show that
our new security definitions cannot be achieved by a large class of ciphers --
those which are quasi-preserving the message length. On the other hand, we
provide a secure construction based on quantum-resistant pseudorandom
permutations; this construction can be used as a generic transformation for
turning a large class of encryption schemes into quantum indistinguishable and
hence quantum semantically secure ones. Moreover, our construction is the first
completely classical encryption scheme shown to be secure against an even
stronger notion of indistinguishability, which was previously known to be
achievable only by using quantum messages and arbitrary quantum encryption
circuits.
