We study notions and schemes for symmetric (ie. private key) encryption in a concrete security framework. We give four different notions of security against chosen plaintext attack and analyze the concrete complexity of reductions among them, providing both upper and lower bounds, and obtaining tight relations. In this way we classify notions (even though polynomially reducible to each other) as stronger or weaker in terms of concrete security. Next we provide concrete security analyses of methods to encrypt using a block cipher, including the most popular encryption method, CBC. We establish tight bounds (meaning matching upper bounds and attacks) on the success of adversaries as a function of their resources.