A Note on the Hardness of Problems from Cryptographic Group Actions
This provides an upper bound on worst-case complexity for cryptographic assumptions used in security protocols, indicating incremental theoretical insight.
The paper shows that the Group Action Inverse Problem (GAIP) and related problems in cryptographic group actions cannot be NP-hard unless the Polynomial Hierarchy collapses, using random self-reductions and interactive proofs.
Given a cryptographic group action, we show that the Group Action Inverse Problem (GAIP) and other related problems cannot be NP-hard unless the Polynomial Hierarchy collapses. We show this via random self-reductions and the design of interactive proofs. Since cryptographic group actions are the building block of many security protocols, this result serves both as an upper bound on the worst-case complexity of some cryptographic assumptions and as proof that the hardness in the worst and in the average case coincide. We also point out the link with Graph Isomorphism and other related NP intermediate problems.