Non-Malleable Extractors and Codes, with their Many Tampered Extensions
This work advances cryptography by providing more efficient and secure randomness extraction and coding methods against tampering, with incremental improvements over prior results.
The paper tackles the challenge of constructing explicit non-malleable extractors and codes for tamper-resilient cryptography, achieving improved min-entropy bounds (e.g., k ≥ log² n for seeded extractors) and introducing the first explicit constructions for multi-tampered variants with parameters like output size n^Ω(1) and error 2^{-n^Ω(1)}.
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 $k \geq n-n^{Ω(1)}$, with output size $n^{Ω(1)}$ and error $2^{-n^{Ω(1)}}$. (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 $n^{Ω(1)}$, which works for min-entropy $k \geq n-n^{Ω(1)}$, with output size $n^{Ω(1)}$ and error $2^{-n^{Ω(1)}}$. 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 $n^{Ω(1)}$, relative rate $n^{Ω(1)}/n$, and error $2^{-n^{Ω(1)}}$.