In PKC 2014, Dachman-Soled showed a construction of a chosen ciphertext (CCA) secure public key encryption (PKE) scheme based on a PKE scheme which simultaneously satisfies a security property called weak simulatability and (standard model) plaintext awareness (sPA1) in the presence of multiple public keys. It is not well-known if plaintext awareness for the multiple keys setting is equivalent to the more familiar notion of that in the single key setting, and it is typically considered that plaintext awareness is a strong security assumption (because to achieve it we have to rely on a “knowledge”-type assumption). In Dachman-Soled’s construction, the underlying PKE scheme needs to be plaintext aware in the presence of 2k + 2 public keys. The main result in this work is to show that the strength of plaintext awareness required in the Dachman-Soled construction can be somehow “traded” with the strength of a “simulatability” property of other building blocks. Furthermore, w...