Excerpts from ePrint papers that include the word "provable"

Over the years I heard many times the claim that papers in theoretical cryptography over-hype the aspects of "provable security". In the context of one specific argument, I saw one person claiming that "theoretical CS community takes their models way too seriously", and another proclaiming that "the gap [in the interpretation of provable-security] between crypto-English and normal-English is regularly exploited as marketing ploy". These claims did not ring true to me and I decided to test them.

I went to the Cryptology ePrint Archive and searched for papers with the word "provable" in either the title, abstract or key-words; the search returned about 80 papers. I then looked at the abstracts of the first 50 papers in that list, and for each paper I extracted a sentence or two that best represent in my eyes the "provable security" claims made in that abstract.

The list below is what I found. As you can see, in pretty much all cases the provable-security claims are quite accurate, rather technical, and very far from being hyped (in fact I find most to be quite nerdy). I do not think that even one of them can be called a "marketing ploy". Similarly, I did not see a tendency to "take the models too seriously". But don't take my word for it, read the list below and judge for yourselves.

-- Shai