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Toward Basing Cryptography on the Hardness of EXP

Published: 21 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Let Kt(x) denote the Levin-Kolmogorov Complexity of the string x, and let MKtP denote the language of pairs (x, k) having the property that Kt(x) ≤ k. We demonstrate that:
• MKtP ∉ HeurnegBPP (i.e., MKtP is two-sided error mildly average-case hard) iff infinitely-often OWFs exist.
• MKtP ∉ AvgnegBPP (i.e., MKtP is errorless mildly average-case hard) iff EXP ≠ BPP.
Taken together, these results show that the only "gap" toward getting (infinitely-often) OWFs from the assumption that EXP ≠ BPP is the seemingly "minor" technical gap between two-sided error and errorless average-case hardness of the MKtP problem.

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cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 66, Issue 5
May 2023
92 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/3594498
  • Editor:
  • James Larus
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 21 April 2023
Published in CACM Volume 66, Issue 5

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