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ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC)

Short seed extractors against quantum storage

Amnon Ta‐Shma

Published May 31, 2009• 24 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In the classical privacy amplification problem Alice and Bob share information that is only partially secret towards an eavesdropper Charlie. Their goal is to distill this information to a shorter string that is completely secret. The classical privacy amplification problem can be solved almost optimally using extractors. An interesting variant of the problem, where the eavesdropper Charlie is allowed to keep quantum information rather than just classical information, was introduced by Konig, Maurer and Renner. In this setting, the eavesdropper Charlie may entangle himself with the input (without changing it) and the only limitation Charlie has is that it may keep at most b qubits of storage. A natural question is whether there are classical extractors that are good even against quantum storage.Recent work has shown that some classical extractors miserably fail against quantum storage. At the same time, it was shown that some other classical extractors work well even against quantum storage, but all these extractors had a large seed length that was either as large as the extractor output, or as large as the quantum storage available to the eavesdropper.In this paper we show that a modified version of Trevisan's extractor is good even against quantum storage, thereby giving the first such construction with logarithmic seed length. The technique we use is a combination of Trevisan's approach of constructing an extractor from a black-box pseudorandom generator, together with locally list-decodable codes and previous work done on quantum random access codes.

DOI
10.1145/1536414.1536470

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Nonmalleable Extractors with Short Seeds and Applications to Privacy Amplification

Gil Cohen, Ran Raz, Gil Segev

Motivated by the classical problem of privacy amplification, Dodis and Wichs [in Proceedings of the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2009, pp. 601--610] introduced the notion of a nonmalleable extractor, significantly strengthening the notion of a strong extractor. A nonmalleable extractor is a function $\mathsf{nmExt}:\{0,1\}^n\times\{0,1\}^d\to\{0,1\}^m$ that takes two inputs---a weak source $W$ and a uniform (independent) seed $S$---and outputs a string $\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S)$ that is nearly uniform given the seed $S$ as well as the value $\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S')$ for any seed $S'\neq S$ that may be determined as an arbitrary function of $S$. The first explicit construction of a nonmalleable extractor was recently provided by Dodis et al. [Privacy Amplification and Non-malleable Extractors via Character Sums, preprint, arXiv:1102.5415 [cs.CR], 2011]. Their extractor works for any weak source with min-entropy rate $1/2+\delta$, where $\delta>0$ is an arbitrary constant and outputs up to a linear number of bits but suffers from two drawbacks. First, the length of its seed is linear in the length of the weak source (which leads to privacy amplification protocols with high communication complexity). Second, the construction is conditional: when outputting more than a logarithmic number of bits (as required for privacy amplification protocols), its efficiency relies on a longstanding conjecture on the distribution of prime numbers. In this paper we present an unconditional construction of a nonmalleable extractor with short seeds. For any integers $n$ and $d$ such that $2.01\cdot\log n\leq d\leq n$, we present an explicit construction of a nonmalleable extractor $\mathsf{nmExt}\colon\{0,1\}^n\times\{0,1\}^d\to\{0,1\}^m$, with $m=\Omega(d)$ and error exponentially small in $m$. The extractor works for any weak source with min-entropy rate $1/2+\delta$, where $\delta>0$ is an arbitrary constant. Moreover, our extractor in fact satisfies an even more general notion of nonmalleability: its output $\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S)$ is nearly uniform given the seed $S$ as well as the values $\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S_1),\dots,\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S_t)$ for several seeds $S_1,\dots,S_t$ that may be determined as an arbitrary function of $S$, as long as $S\notin\{S_1,\dots,S_t\}$. By instantiating the framework of Dodis and Wichs with our nonmalleable extractor, we obtain the first 2-round privacy amplification protocol for min-entropy rate $1/2+\delta$ with asymptotically optimal entropy loss and polylogarithmic communication complexity. This improves the previously known 2-round privacy amplification protocols: the protocol of Dodis and Wichs, whose entropy loss is not asymptotically optimal, and the protocol of Dodis et al., whose communication complexity is linear.

SIAM Journal on Computing•Jan 1, 2014•15 citations
In the classical privacy amplification problem Alice and Bob share information that is only partially secret towards an eavesdropper Charlie. Their goal is to distill this information to a shorter string that is completely secret. The classical privacy amplification problem can be solved almost optimally using extractors. An interesting variant of the problem, where the eavesdropper Charlie is allowed to keep quantum information rather than just classical information, was introduced by Konig, Maurer and Renner. In this setting, the eavesdropper Charlie may entangle himself with the input (without changing it) and the only limitation Charlie has is that it may keep at most b qubits of storage. A natural question is whether there are classical extractors that are good even against quantum storage.Recent work has shown that some classical extractors miserably fail against quantum storage. At the same time, it was shown that some other classical extractors work well even against quantum storage, but all these extractors had a large seed length that was either as large as the extractor output, or as large as the quantum storage available to the eavesdropper.In this paper we show that a modified version of Trevisan's extractor is good even against quantum storage, thereby giving the first such construction with logarithmic seed length. The technique we use is a combination of Trevisan's approach of constructing an extractor from a black-box pseudorandom generator, together with locally list-decodable codes and previous work done on quantum random access codes.
We show that Trevisan's extractor and its variants \cite{T99,RRV99} are secure against bounded quantum storage adversaries. One instantiation gives the first such extractor to achieve an output length Θ(K−b)Θ(K-b)Θ(K−b), where KKK is the source's entropy and bbb the adversary's storage, together with a poly-logarithmic seed length. Another instantiation achieves a logarithmic key length, with a slightly smaller output length Θ((K−b)/Kγ)Θ((K-b)/K^γ)Θ((K−b)/Kγ) for any γ>0γ>0γ>0. In contrast, the previous best construction \cite{TS09} could only extract (K/b)1/15(K/b)^{1/15}(K/b)1/15 bits. Some of our constructions have the additional advantage that every bit of the output is a function of only a polylogarithmic number of bits from the source, which is crucial for some cryptographic applications. Our argument is based on bounds for a generalization of quantum random access codes, which we call \emph{quantum functional access codes}. This is crucial as it lets us avoid the local list-decoding algorithm central to the approach in \cite{TS09}, which was the source of the multiplicative overhead.
We show that Trevisan's extractor and its variants [22,19] are secure against bounded quantum storage adversaries. One instantiation gives the first such extractor to achieve an output length Θ(K-b), where K is the source's entropy and b the adversary's storage, together with a poly-logarithmic seed length. Another instantiation achieves a logarithmic key length, with a slightly smaller output length Θ((K-b)/Kγ) for any γ>0. In contrast, the previous best construction [21] could only extract (K/b)1/15 bits.
We give the first construction of a family of quantum-proof extractors that has optimal seed length dependence O(log⁡(n/ε))O(\log(n/\varepsilon))O(log(n/ε)) on the input length nnn and error ε\varepsilonε. Our extractors support any min-entropy k=Ω(log⁡n+log⁡1+α(1/ε))k=Ω(\log{n} + \log^{1+α}(1/\varepsilon))k=Ω(logn+log1+α(1/ε)) and extract m=(1−α)km=(1-α)km=(1−α)k bits that are ε\varepsilonε-close to uniform, for any desired constant α>0α> 0α>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 automatically quantum-proof, with comparable parameters. The existence of such a reduction for extractors is a long-standing open question, here we give an affirmative answer for condensers. Once this reduction is established, to obtain our quantum-proof extractors one only needs to consider high entropy sources. We construct quantum-proof extractors with the desired parameters for such sources by extending a classical approach to extractor construction, based on the use of block-sources and sampling, to the quantum setting. Our extractors can be used to obtain improved protocols for device-independent randomness expansion and for privacy amplification.
Motivated by the classical problem of privacy amplification, Dodis and Wichs [in Proceedings of the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2009, pp. 601--610] introduced the notion of a nonmalleable extractor, significantly strengthening the notion of a strong extractor. A nonmalleable extractor is a function nmExt:{0,1}n×{0,1}d→{0,1}m\mathsf{nmExt}:\{0,1\}^n\times\{0,1\}^d\to\{0,1\}^mnmExt:{0,1}n×{0,1}d→{0,1}m that takes two inputs---a weak source WWW and a uniform (independent) seed SSS---and outputs a string nmExt(W,S)\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S)nmExt(W,S) that is nearly uniform given the seed SSS as well as the value nmExt(W,S′)\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S')nmExt(W,S′) for any seed S′≠SS'\neq SS′=S that may be determined as an arbitrary function of SSS. The first explicit construction of a nonmalleable extractor was recently provided by Dodis et al. [Privacy Amplification and Non-malleable Extractors via Character Sums, preprint, arXiv:1102.5415 [cs.CR], 2011]. Their extractor works for any weak source with min-entropy rate 1/2+δ1/2+\delta1/2+δ, where δ>0\delta>0δ>0 is an arbitrary constant and outputs up to a linear number of bits but suffers from two drawbacks. First, the length of its seed is linear in the length of the weak source (which leads to privacy amplification protocols with high communication complexity). Second, the construction is conditional: when outputting more than a logarithmic number of bits (as required for privacy amplification protocols), its efficiency relies on a longstanding conjecture on the distribution of prime numbers. In this paper we present an unconditional construction of a nonmalleable extractor with short seeds. For any integers nnn and ddd such that 2.01⋅log⁡n≤d≤n2.01\cdot\log n\leq d\leq n2.01⋅logn≤d≤n, we present an explicit construction of a nonmalleable extractor nmExt ⁣:{0,1}n×{0,1}d→{0,1}m\mathsf{nmExt}\colon\{0,1\}^n\times\{0,1\}^d\to\{0,1\}^mnmExt:{0,1}n×{0,1}d→{0,1}m, with m=Ω(d)m=\Omega(d)m=Ω(d) and error exponentially small in mmm. The extractor works for any weak source with min-entropy rate 1/2+δ1/2+\delta1/2+δ, where δ>0\delta>0δ>0 is an arbitrary constant. Moreover, our extractor in fact satisfies an even more general notion of nonmalleability: its output nmExt(W,S)\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S)nmExt(W,S) is nearly uniform given the seed SSS as well as the values nmExt(W,S1),…,nmExt(W,St)\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S_1),\dots,\mathsf{nmExt}(W,S_t)nmExt(W,S1​),…,nmExt(W,St​) for several seeds S1,…,StS_1,\dots,S_tS1​,…,St​ that may be determined as an arbitrary function of SSS, as long as S∉{S1,…,St}S\notin\{S_1,\dots,S_t\}S∈/{S1​,…,St​}. By instantiating the framework of Dodis and Wichs with our nonmalleable extractor, we obtain the first 2-round privacy amplification protocol for min-entropy rate 1/2+δ1/2+\delta1/2+δ with asymptotically optimal entropy loss and polylogarithmic communication complexity. This improves the previously known 2-round privacy amplification protocols: the protocol of Dodis and Wichs, whose entropy loss is not asymptotically optimal, and the protocol of Dodis et al., whose communication complexity is linear.