List decoding group homomorphisms between supersolvable groups

We show that the set of homomorphisms between two supersolvable groups can be locally list decoded up to the minimum distance of the code, extending the results of Dinur et al who studied the case where the groups are abelian. Moreover, when specialized to the abelian case, our proof is more streamlined and gives a better constant in the exponent of the list size. The constant is improved from about 3.5 million to 105.Comment: 11 page

List decoding Reed-Muller codes over small fields

The list decoding problem for a code asks for the maximal radius up to which any ball of that radius contains only a constant number of codewords. The list decoding radius is not well understood even for well studied codes, like Reed-Solomon or Reed-Muller codes. Fix a finite field $\mathbb{F}$. The Reed-Muller code $\mathrm{RM}_{\mathbb{F}}(n,d)$ is defined by $n$-variate degree-$d$ polynomials over $\mathbb{F}$. In this work, we study the list decoding radius of Reed-Muller codes over a constant prime field $\mathbb{F}=\mathbb{F}_p$, constant degree $d$ and large $n$. We show that the list decoding radius is equal to the minimal distance of the code. That is, if we denote by $\delta(d)$ the normalized minimal distance of $\mathrm{RM}_{\mathbb{F}}(n,d)$, then the number of codewords in any ball of radius $\delta(d)-\varepsilon$ is bounded by $c=c(p,d,\varepsilon)$ independent of $n$. This resolves a conjecture of Gopalan-Klivans-Zuckerman [STOC 2008], who among other results proved it in the special case of $\mathbb{F}=\mathbb{F}_2$; and extends the work of Gopalan [FOCS 2010] who proved the conjecture in the case of $d=2$. We also analyse the number of codewords in balls of radius exceeding the minimal distance of the code. For $e \leq d$, we show that the number of codewords of $\mathrm{RM}_{\mathbb{F}}(n,d)$ in a ball of radius $\delta(e) - \varepsilon$ is bounded by $\exp(c \cdot n^{d-e})$, where $c=c(p,d,\varepsilon)$ is independent of $n$. The dependence on $n$ is tight. This extends the work of Kaufman-Lovett-Porat [IEEE Inf. Theory 2012] who proved similar bounds over $\mathbb{F}_2$. The proof relies on several new ingredients: an extension of the Frieze-Kannan weak regularity to general function spaces, higher-order Fourier analysis, and an extension of the Schwartz-Zippel lemma to compositions of polynomials.Comment: fixed a bug in the proof of claim 5.6 (now lemma 5.5

Optimal Locally Repairable and Secure Codes for Distributed Storage Systems

This paper aims to go beyond resilience into the study of security and local-repairability for distributed storage systems (DSS). Security and local-repairability are both important as features of an efficient storage system, and this paper aims to understand the trade-offs between resilience, security, and local-repairability in these systems. In particular, this paper first investigates security in the presence of colluding eavesdroppers, where eavesdroppers are assumed to work together in decoding stored information. Second, the paper focuses on coding schemes that enable optimal local repairs. It further brings these two concepts together, to develop locally repairable coding schemes for DSS that are secure against eavesdroppers. The main results of this paper include: a. An improved bound on the secrecy capacity for minimum storage regenerating codes, b. secure coding schemes that achieve the bound for some special cases, c. a new bound on minimum distance for locally repairable codes, d. code construction for locally repairable codes that attain the minimum distance bound, and e. repair-bandwidth-efficient locally repairable codes with and without security constraints.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Tiny Codes for Guaranteeable Delay

Future 5G systems will need to support ultra-reliable low-latency communications scenarios. From a latency-reliability viewpoint, it is inefficient to rely on average utility-based system design. Therefore, we introduce the notion of guaranteeable delay which is the average delay plus three standard deviations of the mean. We investigate the trade-off between guaranteeable delay and throughput for point-to-point wireless erasure links with unreliable and delayed feedback, by bringing together signal flow techniques to the area of coding. We use tiny codes, i.e. sliding window by coding with just 2 packets, and design three variations of selective-repeat ARQ protocols, by building on the baseline scheme, i.e. uncoded ARQ, developed by Ausavapattanakun and Nosratinia: (i) Hybrid ARQ with soft combining at the receiver; (ii) cumulative feedback-based ARQ without rate adaptation; and (iii) Coded ARQ with rate adaptation based on the cumulative feedback. Contrasting the performance of these protocols with uncoded ARQ, we demonstrate that HARQ performs only slightly better, cumulative feedback-based ARQ does not provide significant throughput while it has better average delay, and Coded ARQ can provide gains up to about 40% in terms of throughput. Coded ARQ also provides delay guarantees, and is robust to various challenges such as imperfect and delayed feedback, burst erasures, and round-trip time fluctuations. This feature may be preferable for meeting the strict end-to-end latency and reliability requirements of future use cases of ultra-reliable low-latency communications in 5G, such as mission-critical communications and industrial control for critical control messaging.Comment: to appear in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on URLLC in Wireless Network

New Combinatorial Construction Techniques for Low-Density Parity-Check Codes and Systematic Repeat-Accumulate Codes

This paper presents several new construction techniques for low-density parity-check (LDPC) and systematic repeat-accumulate (RA) codes. Based on specific classes of combinatorial designs, the improved code design focuses on high-rate structured codes with constant column weights 3 and higher. The proposed codes are efficiently encodable and exhibit good structural properties. Experimental results on decoding performance with the sum-product algorithm show that the novel codes offer substantial practical application potential, for instance, in high-speed applications in magnetic recording and optical communications channels.Comment: 10 pages; to appear in "IEEE Transactions on Communications

Hermitian self-dual quasi-abelian codes

Quasi-abelian codes constitute an important class of linear codes containing theoretically and practically interesting codes such as quasi-cyclic codes, abelian codes, and cyclic codes. In particular, the sub-class consisting of 1-generator quasi-abelian codes contains large families of good codes. Based on the well-known decomposition of quasi-abelian codes, the characterization and enumeration of Hermitian self-dual quasi-abelian codes are given. In the case of 1-generator quasi-abelian codes, we offer necessary and sufficient conditions for such codes to be Hermitian self-dual and give a formula for the number of these codes. In the case where the underlying groups are some $p$-groups, the actual number of resulting Hermitian self-dual quasi-abelian codes are determined

Degree-DD Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings: Constructions and Applications

In the recent work of (Cheon & Lee, Eurocrypt\u2722), the concept of a degree-$D$ packing method was formally introduced, which captures the idea of embedding multiple elements of a smaller ring into a larger ring, so that element-wise multiplication in the former is somewhat compatible with the product in the latter. Then, several optimal bounds and results are presented, and furthermore, the concept is generalized from one multiplication to degrees larger than two. These packing methods encompass several constructions seen in the literature in contexts like secure multiparty computation and fully homomorphic encryption. One such construction is the concept of reverse multiplication-friendly embeddings (RMFEs), which are essentially degree-2 packing methods. In this work we generalize the notion of RMFEs to \emph{degree-$D$ RMFEs} which, in spite of being more algebraic than packing methods, turn out to be essentially equivalent. Then, we present a general construction of degree-$D$ RMFEs by generalizing the ideas on algebraic geometry used to construct traditional degree-$2$ RMFEs which, by the aforementioned equivalence, leads to explicit constructions of packing methods. Furthermore, our theory is given in an unified manner for general Galois rings, which include both rings of the form $\mathbb{Z}_{p^k}$ and fields like $\mathbb{F}_{p^k}$, which have been treated separately in prior works. We present multiple concrete sets of parameters for degree-$D$ RMFEs (including $D=2$), which can be useful for future works. Finally, we apply our RMFEs to the task of non-interactively generating high degree correlations for secure multiparty computation protocols. This requires the use of Shamir secret sharing for a large number of parties, which is known to require large-degree Galois ring extensions. Our RMFE enables the generation of such preprocessing data over small rings, without paying for the multiplicative overhead incurred by using Galois ring extensions of large degree. For our application we also construct along the way, as a side contribution of potential independent interest, a pseudo-random secret-sharing solution for non-interactive generation of packed Shamir-sharings over Galois rings with structured secrets, inspired by the PRSS solutions from (Benhamouda et al, TCC 2021)

Graphical Structures for Design and Verification of Quantum Error Correction

We introduce a high-level graphical framework for designing and analysing quantum error correcting codes, centred on what we term the coherent parity check (CPC). The graphical formulation is based on the diagrammatic tools of the zx-calculus of quantum observables. The resulting framework leads to a construction for stabilizer codes that allows us to design and verify a broad range of quantum codes based on classical ones, and that gives a means of discovering large classes of codes using both analytical and numerical methods. We focus in particular on the smaller codes that will be the first used by near-term devices. We show how CSS codes form a subset of CPC codes and, more generally, how to compute stabilizers for a CPC code. As an explicit example of this framework, we give a method for turning almost any pair of classical [n,k,3] codes into a [[2n - k + 2, k, 3]] CPC code. Further, we give a simple technique for machine search which yields thousands of potential codes, and demonstrate its operation for distance 3 and 5 codes. Finally, we use the graphical tools to demonstrate how Clifford computation can be performed within CPC codes. As our framework gives a new tool for constructing small- to medium-sized codes with relatively high code rates, it provides a new source for codes that could be suitable for emerging devices, while its zx-calculus foundations enable natural integration of error correction with graphical compiler toolchains. It also provides a powerful framework for reasoning about all stabilizer quantum error correction codes of any size.Comment: Computer code associated with this paper may be found at https://doi.org/10.15128/r1bn999672