Average-Case Complexity

We survey the average-case complexity of problems in NP. We discuss various notions of good-on-average algorithms, and present completeness results due to Impagliazzo and Levin. Such completeness results establish the fact that if a certain specific (but somewhat artificial) NP problem is easy-on-average with respect to the uniform distribution, then all problems in NP are easy-on-average with respect to all samplable distributions. Applying the theory to natural distributional problems remain an outstanding open question. We review some natural distributional problems whose average-case complexity is of particular interest and that do not yet fit into this theory. A major open question whether the existence of hard-on-average problems in NP can be based on the P$\neq$NP assumption or on related worst-case assumptions. We review negative results showing that certain proof techniques cannot prove such a result. While the relation between worst-case and average-case complexity for general NP problems remains open, there has been progress in understanding the relation between different ``degrees'' of average-case complexity. We discuss some of these ``hardness amplification'' results

Inapproximability of Combinatorial Optimization Problems

We survey results on the hardness of approximating combinatorial optimization problems

Computational Indistinguishability between Quantum States and Its Cryptographic Application

We introduce a computational problem of distinguishing between two specific quantum states as a new cryptographic problem to design a quantum cryptographic scheme that is "secure" against any polynomial-time quantum adversary. Our problem, QSCDff, is to distinguish between two types of random coset states with a hidden permutation over the symmetric group of finite degree. This naturally generalizes the commonly-used distinction problem between two probability distributions in computational cryptography. As our major contribution, we show that QSCDff has three properties of cryptographic interest: (i) QSCDff has a trapdoor; (ii) the average-case hardness of QSCDff coincides with its worst-case hardness; and (iii) QSCDff is computationally at least as hard as the graph automorphism problem in the worst case. These cryptographic properties enable us to construct a quantum public-key cryptosystem, which is likely to withstand any chosen plaintext attack of a polynomial-time quantum adversary. We further discuss a generalization of QSCDff, called QSCDcyc, and introduce a multi-bit encryption scheme that relies on similar cryptographic properties of QSCDcyc.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. We improved presentation, and added more detail proofs and follow-up of recent wor

Cryptography from tensor problems

We describe a new proposal for a trap-door one-way function. The new proposal belongs to the "multivariate quadratic" family but the trap-door is different from existing methods, and is simpler

Constructing lattice points for numerical integration by a reduced fast successive coordinate search algorithm

In this paper, we study an efficient algorithm for constructing node sets of high-quality quasi-Monte Carlo integration rules for weighted Korobov, Walsh, and Sobolev spaces. The algorithm presented is a reduced fast successive coordinate search (SCS) algorithm, which is adapted to situations where the weights in the function space show a sufficiently fast decay. The new SCS algorithm is designed to work for the construction of lattice points, and, in a modified version, for polynomial lattice points, and the corresponding integration rules can be used to treat functions in different kinds of function spaces. We show that the integration rules constructed by our algorithms satisfy error bounds of optimal convergence order. Furthermore, we give details on efficient implementation such that we obtain a considerable speed-up of previously known SCS algorithms. This improvement is illustrated by numerical results. The speed-up obtained by our results may be of particular interest in the context of QMC for PDEs with random coefficients, where both the dimension and the required numberof points are usually very large. Furthermore, our main theorems yield previously unknown generalizations of earlier results.Comment: 33 pages, 2 figure