Speaker: Carl Bosley (Stevens)
Time: Monday, October 5, 2PM
Location: Babbio 221

Host: Antonio Nicolosi

Abstract:
Most cryptographic primitives require randomness (for example, to generate secret keys). Usually, one assumes that perfect randomness is available, but, conceivably, such primitives might be built underweaker, more realistic assumptions. This is known to be achievable for many authentication applications, when entropy alone is typically sufficient. In contrast, all known techniques for achieving privacy seem to fundamentally require (nearly) perfect randomness. We ask the question whether this is just a coincidence, or, perhaps, privacy inherently requires true randomness? We completely resolve this question for information-theoretic private-key encryption, where parties wish to encrypt a b-bit value using a shared secret key sampled from some imperfect source of randomness S . Our technique also extends to related primitives which are sufficiently binding and hiding, including computationally secure commitments and public-key encryption. Our main result shows that if such n-bit source S allows for a secure encryption of b bits, where b > log n, then one can deterministically extract nearly b almost perfect random bits from S. Further, the restriction that b > log n is nearly tight: there exist sources S allowing one to perfectly encrypt (log n - loglog n) bits, but not to deterministically extract even a single slightly unbiased bit. Hence, to a large extent, true randomness is inherent for encryption: either the key length must be exponential in the message length b, or one can deterministically extract nearly b almost unbiased random bits from the key. In particular, the one- time pad scheme is essentially "universal".

Bio:
Carl Bosley received an A.B. from Harvard in 2001 in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2009 in Computer Science, under the supervision of Yevgeniy Dodis. His interests include randomness requirements for cryptographic applications, and relationships between hardness of learning and cryptography.