Informally, an <i>obfuscator</i> <b>O</b> is an (efficient, probabilistic)
"compiler" that takes as input a program (or circuit) <b>P</b> and
produces a new program <b>O(P)</b> that has the same functionality as <b>P</b>
yet is "unintelligible" in some sense. Obfuscators, if they exist,
would have a wide variety of cryptographic ... more >>>

A common method for increasing the usability and uplifting the security of pseudorandom function families (PRFs) is to ``hash" the inputs into a smaller domain before applying the PRF. This approach, known as ``Levin's trick", is used to achieve ``PRF domain extension" (using a short, e.g., fixed, input length PRF ... more >>>

In the first part of this work, we introduce a new type of pseudo-random function for which ``aggregate queries'' over exponential-sized sets can be efficiently answered. An example of an aggregate query may be the product of all function values belonging to an exponential-sized interval, or the sum of all ... more >>>

We present direct constructions of pseudorandom function (PRF) families based on Goldreich's one-way function. Roughly speaking, we assume that non-trivial local mappings $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}^m$ whose input-output dependencies graph form an expander are hard to invert. We show that this one-wayness assumption yields PRFs with relatively low complexity. This includes weak ... more >>>

We prove several results giving new and stronger connections between learning theory, circuit complexity and pseudorandomness. Let C be any typical class of Boolean circuits, and C[s(n)] denote n-variable C-circuits of size at most s(n). We show:

Learning Speedups: If C[$n^{O(1)}$] admits a randomized weak learning algorithm under the uniform ... more >>>

In 1984, Goldreich, Goldwasser and Micali formalized the concept of pseudorandom functions and proposed a construction based on any length-doubling pseudorandom generator. Since then, pseudorandom functions have turned out to be an extremely influential abstraction, with applications ranging from message authentication to barriers in proving computational complexity lower bounds.

In ... more >>>

One-way functions (OWFs) are central objects of study in cryptography and computational complexity theory. In a seminal work, Liu and Pass (FOCS 2020) proved that the average-case hardness of computing time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is equivalent to the existence of OWFs. It remained an open problem to establish such an equivalence ... more >>>

How much computational resource do we need for cryptography? This is an important question of both theoretical and practical interests. In this paper, we study the problem on pseudorandom functions (PRFs) in the context of circuit complexity. Perhaps surprisingly, we prove extremely tight upper and lower bounds in various circuit ... more >>>