License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2018.23
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-88669
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2018/8866/
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Chen, Yi-Hsiu ; Göös, Mika ; Vadhan, Salil P. ; Zhang, Jiapeng

A Tight Lower Bound for Entropy Flattening

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LIPIcs-CCC-2018-23.pdf (0.6 MB)

Abstract

We study entropy flattening: Given a circuit C_X implicitly describing an n-bit source X (namely, X is the output of C_X on a uniform random input), construct another circuit C_Y describing a source Y such that (1) source Y is nearly flat (uniform on its support), and (2) the Shannon entropy of Y is monotonically related to that of X. The standard solution is to have C_Y evaluate C_X altogether Theta(n^2) times on independent inputs and concatenate the results (correctness follows from the asymptotic equipartition property). In this paper, we show that this is optimal among black-box constructions: Any circuit C_Y for entropy flattening that repeatedly queries C_X as an oracle requires Omega(n^2) queries.
Entropy flattening is a component used in the constructions of pseudorandom generators and other cryptographic primitives from one-way functions [Johan Håstad et al., 1999; John Rompel, 1990; Thomas Holenstein, 2006; Iftach Haitner et al., 2006; Iftach Haitner et al., 2009; Iftach Haitner et al., 2013; Iftach Haitner et al., 2010; Salil P. Vadhan and Colin Jia Zheng, 2012]. It is also used in reductions between problems complete for statistical zero-knowledge [Tatsuaki Okamoto, 2000; Amit Sahai and Salil P. Vadhan, 1997; Oded Goldreich et al., 1999; Vadhan, 1999]. The Theta(n^2) query complexity is often the main efficiency bottleneck. Our lower bound can be viewed as a step towards proving that the current best construction of pseudorandom generator from arbitrary one-way functions by Vadhan and Zheng (STOC 2012) has optimal efficiency.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs:2018:8866,
  author =	{Yi-Hsiu Chen and Mika G{\"o}{\"o}s and Salil P. Vadhan and Jiapeng Zhang},
  title =	{{A Tight Lower Bound for Entropy Flattening}},
  booktitle =	{33rd Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2018)},
  pages =	{23:1--23:28},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-069-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{102},
  editor =	{Rocco A. Servedio},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/8866},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-88669},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2018.23},
  annote =	{Keywords: Entropy, One-way function}
}

Keywords: Entropy, One-way function
Collection: 33rd Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2018)
Issue Date: 2018
Date of publication: 04.06.2018

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