License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2021.7
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-155181
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2021/15518/
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Allender, Eric ; Cheraghchi, Mahdi ; Myrisiotis, Dimitrios ; Tirumala, Harsha ; Volkovich, Ilya

One-Way Functions and a Conditional Variant of MKTP

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Abstract

One-way functions (OWFs) are central objects of study in cryptography and computational complexity theory. In a seminal work, Liu and Pass (FOCS 2020) proved that the average-case hardness of computing time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is equivalent to the existence of OWFs. It remained an open problem to establish such an equivalence for the average-case hardness of some natural NP-complete problem. In this paper, we make progress on this question by studying a conditional variant of the Minimum KT-complexity Problem (MKTP), which we call McKTP, as follows.
1) First, we prove that if McKTP is average-case hard on a polynomial fraction of its instances, then there exist OWFs.
2) Then, we observe that McKTP is NP-complete under polynomial-time randomized reductions.
3) Finally, we prove that the existence of OWFs implies the nontrivial average-case hardness of McKTP. Thus the existence of OWFs is inextricably linked to the average-case hardness of this NP-complete problem. In fact, building on recently-announced results of Ren and Santhanam [Rahul Ilango et al., 2021], we show that McKTP is hard-on-average if and only if there are logspace-computable OWFs.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{allender_et_al:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2021.7,
  author =	{Allender, Eric and Cheraghchi, Mahdi and Myrisiotis, Dimitrios and Tirumala, Harsha and Volkovich, Ilya},
  title =	{{One-Way Functions and a Conditional Variant of MKTP}},
  booktitle =	{41st IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2021)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:19},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-215-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{213},
  editor =	{Boja\'{n}czy, Miko{\l}aj and Chekuri, Chandra},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2021/15518},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-155181},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2021.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Kolmogorov complexity, KT Complexity, Minimum KT-complexity Problem, MKTP, Conditional KT Complexity, Minimum Conditional KT-complexity Problem, McKTP, one-way functions, OWFs, average-case hardness, pseudorandom generators, PRGs, pseudorandom functions, PRFs, distinguishers, learning algorithms, NP-completeness, reductions}
}

Keywords: Kolmogorov complexity, KT Complexity, Minimum KT-complexity Problem, MKTP, Conditional KT Complexity, Minimum Conditional KT-complexity Problem, McKTP, one-way functions, OWFs, average-case hardness, pseudorandom generators, PRGs, pseudorandom functions, PRFs, distinguishers, learning algorithms, NP-completeness, reductions
Collection: 41st IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2021)
Issue Date: 2021
Date of publication: 29.11.2021

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