Non-Malleable Extractors and Codes, with their Many Tampered Extensions

Randomness extractors and error correcting codes are fundamental objects in computer science. Recently, there have been several natural generalizations of these objects, in the context and study of tamper resilient cryptography. These are seeded non-malleable extractors, introduced in [DW09]; seedless non-malleable extractors, introduced in [CG14b]; and non-malleable codes, introduced in [DPW10]. However, explicit constructions of non-malleable extractors appear to be hard, and the known constructions are far behind their non-tampered counterparts. In this paper we make progress towards solving the above problems. Our contributions are as follows. (1) We construct an explicit seeded non-malleable extractor for min-entropy $k \geq \log^2 n$. This dramatically improves all previous results and gives a simpler 2-round privacy amplification protocol with optimal entropy loss, matching the best known result in [Li15b]. (2) We construct the first explicit non-malleable two-source extractor for min-entropy $k \geq n-n^{\Omega(1)}$, with output size $n^{\Omega(1)}$ and error $2^{-n^{\Omega(1)}}$. (3) We initiate the study of two natural generalizations of seedless non-malleable extractors and non-malleable codes, where the sources or the codeword may be tampered many times. We construct the first explicit non-malleable two-source extractor with tampering degree $t$ up to $n^{\Omega(1)}$, which works for min-entropy $k \geq n-n^{\Omega(1)}$, with output size $n^{\Omega(1)}$ and error $2^{-n^{\Omega(1)}}$. We show that we can efficiently sample uniformly from any pre-image. By the connection in [CG14b], we also obtain the first explicit non-malleable codes with tampering degree $t$ up to $n^{\Omega(1)}$, relative rate $n^{\Omega(1)}/n$, and error $2^{-n^{\Omega(1)}}$.Comment: 50 pages; see paper for full abstrac

Inapproximability of Combinatorial Optimization Problems

We survey results on the hardness of approximating combinatorial optimization problems

On the Doubly Sparse Compressed Sensing Problem

A new variant of the Compressed Sensing problem is investigated when the number of measurements corrupted by errors is upper bounded by some value l but there are no more restrictions on errors. We prove that in this case it is enough to make 2(t+l) measurements, where t is the sparsity of original data. Moreover for this case a rather simple recovery algorithm is proposed. An analog of the Singleton bound from coding theory is derived what proves optimality of the corresponding measurement matrices.Comment: 6 pages, IMACC2015 (accepted

Deterministic Construction of Binary, Bipolar and Ternary Compressed Sensing Matrices

In this paper we establish the connection between the Orthogonal Optical Codes (OOC) and binary compressed sensing matrices. We also introduce deterministic bipolar $m\times n$ RIP fulfilling $\pm 1$ matrices of order $k$ such that $m\leq\mathcal{O}\big(k (\log_2 n)^{\frac{\log_2 k}{\ln \log_2 k}}\big)$. The columns of these matrices are binary BCH code vectors where the zeros are replaced by -1. Since the RIP is established by means of coherence, the simple greedy algorithms such as Matching Pursuit are able to recover the sparse solution from the noiseless samples. Due to the cyclic property of the BCH codes, we show that the FFT algorithm can be employed in the reconstruction methods to considerably reduce the computational complexity. In addition, we combine the binary and bipolar matrices to form ternary sensing matrices ($\{0,1,-1\}$ elements) that satisfy the RIP condition.Comment: The paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Information Theor