International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 28 April 2015

Maciej Skorski, Alexander Golovnev, Krzysztof Pietrzak
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We consider the task of deriving a key with high HILL

entropy (i.e., being computationally indistinguishable from

a key with high min-entropy) from an unpredictable source.

Previous to this work, the only known way to transform unpredictability into

a key that was $\\eps$ indistinguishable from having min-entropy was via

pseudorandomness, for example by Goldreich-Levin (GL) hardcore bits.

This approach has the inherent limitation that from a source with $k$ bits of unpredictability entropy one can derive a key of length (and thus HILL entropy)

at most $k-2\\log(1/\\epsilon)$ bits. In many settings, e.g. when dealing with biometric data, such a $2\\log(1/\\epsilon)$ bit entropy loss in not an option.

Our main technical contribution is a theorem that states that in the high entropy regime, unpredictability implies HILL entropy.

Concretely, any variable $K$ with $|K|-d$ bits of unpredictability entropy has the same amount of so called

metric entropy (against real-valued, deterministic distinguishers), which is known to imply the same amount of HILL entropy.

The loss in circuit size in this argument is exponential in the entropy gap $d$, and thus this result only applies for small $d$ (i.e., where the

size of distinguishers considered is exponential in $d$).

To overcome the above restriction, we investigate if it\'s possible to first ``condense\'\' unpredictability entropy and make the entropy gap small. We show that any source with

$k$ bits of unpredictability can be condensed into a source of length $k$ with $k-3$ bits of unpredictability entropy.

Our condenser simply ``abuses\" the GL construction and derives a $k$ bit key from a source with $k$ bits of unpredicatibily. The original GL theorem

implies nothing when extracting

that many bits, but we show that in this regime, GL still behaves like a ``condenser\" for unpredictability.

This result comes with two caveats (1) the loss in circuit size is exponential in $k$ and (2) we require that the source we start with has \\emph{no} HILL entropy (equivalently, one can efficiently check if a guess is correct). We leave it as an intriguing open problem to

overcome these restrictions or to prove they\'re inherent.

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