A long line of work in the past two decades or so established close connections between several different pseudorandom objects and applications. These connections essentially show that an asymptotically optimal construction of one central object will lead to asymptotically optimal solutions to all the others. However, despite considerable effort, previous works can get close but still lack one final step to achieve truly asymptotically optimal constructions.
In this paper we provide the last missing link, thus simultaneously achieving explicit, asymptotically optimal constructions and solutions for various well studied extractors and applications, that have been the subjects of long lines of research. Our results include:
Asymptotically optimal seeded non-malleable extractors, which in turn give two source extractors for asymptotically optimal min-entropy of $O(\log n)$, explicit constructions of $K$-Ramsey graphs on $N$ vertices with $K=\log^{O(1)} N$, and truly optimal privacy amplification protocols with an active adversary.
Two source non-malleable extractors and affine non-malleable extractors for some linear min-entropy with exponentially small error, which in turn give the first explicit construction of non-malleable codes against $2$-split state tampering and affine tampering with constant rate and \emph{exponentially} small error.
Explicit extractors for affine sources, sumset sources, interleaved sources, and small space sources that achieve asymptotically optimal min-entropy of $O(\log n)$ or $2s+O(\log n)$ (for space $s$ sources).
An explicit function that requires strongly linear read once branching programs of size $2^{n-O(\log n)}$, which is optimal up to the constant in $O(\cdot)$. Previously, even for standard read once branching programs, the best known size lower bound for an explicit function is $2^{n-O(\log^2 n)}$.
We make progress in the following three problems: 1. Constructing optimal seeded non-malleable extractors; 2. Constructing optimal privacy amplification protocols with an active adversary, for any security parameter; 3. Constructing extractors for independent weak random sources, when the min-entropy is extremely small (i.e., near logarithmic). For the first two problems, the best known non-malleable extractors by Chattopadhyay, Goyal and Li [CGL16], and by Cohen [Coh16a,Coh16b] all require seed length and min-entropy at least $\log^2 (1/ε)$, where $ε$ is the error of the extractor. As a resul…
In this paper we give improved constructions of several central objects in the literature of randomness extraction and tamper-resilient cryptography. Our main results are: (1) An explicit seeded non-malleable extractor with error $ε$ and seed length $d=O(\log n)+O(\log(1/ε)\log \log (1/ε))$, that supports min-entropy $k=Ω(d)$ and outputs $Ω(k)$ bits. Combined with the protocol in \cite{DW09}, this gives a two round privacy amplification protocol with optimal entropy loss in the presence of an active adversary, for all security parameters up to $Ω(k/\log k)$. (2) An explicit non-malleable two-s…
A $(k,\varepsilon)$-non-malleable extractor is a function ${\sf nmExt} : \{0,1\}^n \times \{0,1\}^d \to \{0,1\}$ that takes two inputs, a weak source $X \sim \{0,1\}^n$ of min-entropy $k$ and an independent uniform seed $s \in \{0,1\}^d$, and outputs a bit ${\sf nmExt}(X, s)$ that is $\varepsilon$-close to uniform, even given the seed $s$ and the value ${\sf nmExt}(X, s')$ for an adversarially chosen seed $s' \neq s$. Dodis and Wichs~(STOC 2009) showed the existence of $(k, \varepsilon)$-non-malleable extractors with seed length $d = \log(n-k-1) + 2\log(1/\varepsilon) + 6$ that support sources…
We study the problem of extracting random bits from weak sources that are sampled by algorithms with limited memory. This model of small-space sources was introduced by Kamp, Rao, Vadhan and Zuckerman (STOC'06), and falls into a line of research initiated by Trevisan and Vadhan (FOCS'00) on extracting randomness from weak sources that are sampled by computationally bounded algorithms. Our main results are the following. 1. We obtain near-optimal extractors for small-space sources in the polynomial error regime. For space $s$ sources over $n$ bits, our extractors require just $k\geq s\cdot$poly…
The recent line of study on randomness extractors has been a great success, resulting in exciting new techniques, new connections, and breakthroughs to long standing open problems in several seemingly different topics. These include seeded non-malleable extractors, privacy amplification protocols with an active adversary, independent source extractors (and explicit Ramsey graphs), and non-malleable codes in the split state model. However, in all cases there is still a gap to optimum and the motivation to close this gap remains strong. In this paper, we introduce a set of new techniques to furt…
A random variable $X$ is an $(n,k)$-zero-fixing source if for some subset $V\subseteq[n]$, $X$ is the uniform distribution on the strings $\{0,1\}^n$ that are zero on every coordinate outside of $V$. An $ε$-extractor for $(n,k)$-zero-fixing sources is a mapping $F:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^m$, for some $m$, such that $F(X)$ is $ε$-close in statistical distance to the uniform distribution on $\{0,1\}^m$ for every $(n,k)$-zero-fixing source $X$. Zero-fixing sources were introduced by Cohen and Shinkar in [10] in connection with the previously studied extractors for bit-fixing sources. They constructed…
The notion of semi-random sources, also known as Santha-Vazirani (SV) sources, stands for a sequence of n bits, where the dependence of the i'th bit on the previous i-1 bits is limited for every $i\in[n]$. If the dependence of the i'th bit on the remaining n-1 bits is limited, then this is a strong SV-source. Even the strong SV-sources are known not to admit (universal) deterministic extractors, but they have seeded extractors, as their min-entropy is $Ω(n)$. It is intuitively obvious that strong SV-sources are more than just high-min-entropy sources, and this work explores the intuition. Dete…
We consider the problem of extracting randomness from \textit{sumset sources}, a general class of weak sources introduced by Chattopadhyay and Li (STOC, 2016). An $(n,k,C)$-sumset source $\mathbf{X}$ is a distribution on $\{0,1\}^n$ of the form $\mathbf{X}_1 + \mathbf{X}_2 + \ldots + \mathbf{X}_C$, where $\mathbf{X}_i$'s are independent sources on $n$ bits with min-entropy at least $k$. Prior extractors either required the number of sources $C$ to be a large constant or the min-entropy $k$ to be at least $0.51 n$. As our main result, we construct an explicit extractor for sumset sources in the…
We give the first construction of a family of quantum-proof extractors that has optimal seed length dependence $O(\log(n/\varepsilon))$ on the input length $n$ and error $\varepsilon$. Our extractors support any min-entropy $k=Ω(\log{n} + \log^{1+α}(1/\varepsilon))$ and extract $m=(1-α)k$ bits that are $\varepsilon$-close to uniform, for any desired constant $α> 0$. Previous constructions had a quadratically worse seed length or were restricted to very large input min-entropy or very few output bits. Our result is based on a generic reduction showing that any strong classical condenser is auto…
Nearly-Linear Time Seeded Extractors with Short Seeds
Ben-Gurion University(本古里安大学);Instituto de Telecomunicações and Departamento de Matemática, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa(里斯本大学高等技术学院数学系与电信研究所);NOVA LINCS and NOVA School of Science and Technology(诺瓦线性计算与系统研究中心与诺瓦科学技术学院)
We construct explicit deterministic extractors for polynomial images of varieties, that is, distributions sampled by applying a low-degree polynomial map $f : \mathbb{F}_q^r \to \mathbb{F}_q^n$ to an element sampled uniformly at random from a $k$-dimensional variety $V \subseteq \mathbb{F}_q^r$. This class of sources generalizes both polynomial sources, studied by Dvir, Gabizon and Wigderson (FOCS 2007, Comput. Complex. 2009), and variety sources, studied by Dvir (CCC 2009, Comput. Complex. 2012). Assuming certain natural non-degeneracy conditions on the map $f$ and the variety $V$, which in p…
We continue a line of work on extracting random bits from weak sources that are generated by simple processes. We focus on the model of locally samplable sources, where each bit in the source depends on a small number of (hidden) uniformly random input bits. Also known as local sources, this model was introduced by De and Watson (TOCT 2012) and Viola (SICOMP 2014), and is closely related to sources generated by $\mathsf{AC}^0$ circuits and bounded-width branching programs. In particular, extractors for local sources also work for sources generated by these classical computational models. Despi…