International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Non-malleable codes, introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS 2010), encode messages $s$ in a manner so that tampering the codeword causes the decoder to either output $s$ or a message that is independent of $s$. While this is an impossible goal to achieve against unrestricted tampering functions, rather surprisingly non-malleable coding becomes possible against every fixed family $F$ of tampering functions that is not too large (for instance, when $|F| \\le \\exp(2^{\\alpha n})$ for some $\\alpha \\in [0, 1)$ where $n$ is the number of bits in a codeword).

In this work, we study the \"capacity of non-malleable coding\", and establish optimal bounds on the achievable rate as a function of the family size, answering an open problem from Dziembowski et al. (ICS 2010). Specifically,

1. We prove that for every family $F$ with $|F| \\le \\exp(2^{\\alpha n})$, there exist non-malleable codes against $F$ with rate arbitrarily close to $1-\\alpha$ (this is achieved w.h.p. by a randomized construction).

2. We show the existence of families of size $\\exp(n^{O(1)} 2^{\\alpha n})$ against which there is no non-malleable code of rate $1-\\alpha$ (in fact this is the case w.h.p for a random family of this size).

3. We also show that $1-\\alpha$ is the best achievable rate for the family of functions which are only allowed to tamper the first $\\alpha n$ bits of the codeword, which is of special interest.

As a corollary, this implies that the capacity of non-malleable coding in the split-state model (where the tampering function acts independently but arbitrarily on the two halves of the codeword) equals $1/2$.

We also give an efficient Monte Carlo construction of codes of rate close to 1 with polynomial time encoding and decoding that is non-malleable against any fixed $c > 0$ and family $F$ of size $\\exp(n^c)$, in particular tampering functions with, say, cubic size circuits.