Gil Cohen

Gil Cohen, Leonard J. Schulman, Piyush Srivastava

Since the introduction of tree codes by Schulman (STOC 1993), explicit construction of asymptotically good tree codes has remained a notorious challenge. A work by Cohen, Haeupler and Schulman (STOC 2018), as well as the state-of-the-art construction by Ben Yaacov, Cohen, and Yankovitz (STOC 2022) have achieved codes with rate $Ω(1/\log\log n)$, exponentially improving upon the original rate $Ω(1/\log n)$ construction of Evans, Klugerman and Schulman from 1994. All of these constructions rely, at least in part, on increasingly sophisticated methods of combining (block) error-correcting codes. In this work, we identify a fundamental barrier to constructing tree codes using known techniques. We introduce a key property which we call immediacy, that, while not required by the original definition of tree codes, is shared by all known constructions and inherently arises in recursive combinations of error-correcting codes. Our main technical contribution is the proof of a rate-immediacy trade-off, which, in particular, implies that any tree code with constant distance and non-trivial immediacy must necessarily have vanishing rate. By applying our rate-immediacy trade-off to existing constructions, we establish that their known rate analyses are essentially optimal given their actual error-correction properties. More broadly, our work highlights the need for fundamentally new ideas -- beyond the recursive use of error-correcting codes -- to achieve substantial progress in explicitly constructing asymptotically good tree codes.

Gil Cohen, Thomas Vidick

Privacy amplification is the task by which two cooperating parties transform a shared weak secret, about which an eavesdropper may have side information, into a uniformly random string uncorrelated from the eavesdropper. Privacy amplification against passive adversaries, where it is assumed that the communication is over a public but authenticated channel, can be achieved in the presence of classical as well as quantum side information by a single-message protocol based on strong extractors. In 2009 Dodis and Wichs devised a two-message protocol to achieve privacy amplification against active adversaries, where the public communication channel is no longer assumed to be authenticated, through the use of a strengthening of strong extractors called non-malleable extractors which they introduced. Dodis and Wichs only analyzed the case of classical side information. We consider the task of privacy amplification against active adversaries with quantum side information. Our main result is showing that the Dodis-Wichs protocol remains secure in this scenario provided its main building block, the non-malleable extractor, satisfies a notion of quantum-proof non-malleability which we introduce. We show that an adaptation of a recent construction of non-malleable extractors due to Chattopadhyay et al. is quantum proof, thereby providing the first protocol for privacy amplification that is secure against active quantum adversaries. Our protocol is quantitatively comparable to the near-optimal protocols known in the classical setting.