IACR News item: 31 October 2014
Siyao Guo, Tal Malkin, Igor C. Oliveira, Alon Rosen
ePrint Reportfunctions has been prevalent in complexity theory as well as in computational learning theory, but little attention has been given to
it in the cryptographic context. Recently, Goldreich and
Izsak (2012) have initiated a study of whether cryptographic
primitives can be monotone, and showed that one-way functions can be
monotone (assuming they exist), but a pseudorandom generator cannot.
In this paper, we start by filling in the picture and proving that many
other basic cryptographic primitives cannot be monotone. We then
initiate a quantitative study of the power of negations,
asking how many negations are required. We provide several
lower bounds, some of them tight,
for various cryptographic primitives and building blocks
including one-way permutations, pseudorandom functions, small-bias generators, hard-core predicates, error-correcting codes, and randomness extractors.
Among our results, we highlight the following.
i) Pseudorandom functions can only be computed by circuits
containing at least log n - O(1) negations
(which is optimal up to the additive term).
ii) We prove that error-correcting codes with optimal distance
parameters require log n - O(1) negations (again, optimal up to
the additive term).
iii) Unlike one-way functions, one-way permutations cannot be
monotone.
iv) We prove a general result for monotone functions,
showing a lower bound on the depth of any
circuit with t negations on the bottom that computes a monotone function f in terms of the monotone
circuit depth of f. This result addresses a question posed by Koroth and Sarma (2014) in the context of the circuit complexity
of the Clique problem.
Our results lead to a few intriguing open problems, and to interesting directions for further research.
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