On pseudorandom generators with linear stretch in NC0

Benny Applebaum, Yuval Ishai, Eyal Kushilevitz

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

40 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider the question of constructing cryptographic pseudorandom generators (PRGs) in NC0, namely ones in which each bit of the output depends on just a constant number of input bits. Previous constructions of such PRGs were limited to stretching a seed of n bits to n + o(n) bits. This leaves open the existence of a PRG with a linear (let alone superlinear) stretch in NC0. In this work we study this question and obtain the following main results: 1. We show that the existence of a linear-stretch PRG in NC 0 implies non-trivial hardness of approximation results without relying on PCP machinery. In particular, it implies that Max3SAT is hard to approximate to within some multiplicative constant. 2. We construct a linear-stretch PRG in NC0 under a specific intractability assumption related to the hardness of decoding "sparsely generated" linear codes. Such an assumption was previously conjectured by Alekhnovich (FOCS 2003).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)38-69
Number of pages32
JournalComputational Complexity
Volume17
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2008

Keywords

  • Constant depth circuits
  • Cryptography
  • Pseudorandom generators
  • nc0

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Mathematics
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computational Mathematics

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