One-way functions are essential for complexity based cryptography

  • Authors:
  • R. Impagliazzo;M. Luby

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Math., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA;-

  • Venue:
  • SFCS '89 Proceedings of the 30th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 1989

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

It is shown that many of the standard cryptographic tasks are equivalent to the usual definition of a one-way function. In particular, it is shown that for some of the standard cryptographic tasks any secure protocol for the task can be converted into a one-way function in the usual sense, and thus the security of any proposed protocol for these tasks is implicitly based on a function being 'one-way.' Thus, the usual definition of a one-way function is robust; any one-way function with respect to another definition on which a secure cryptographic protocol can be based can be used to construct a one-way function in the usual sense. The authors focus on private-key encryption, identification/authentication, bit commitment, and coin flipping by telephone. However, the proof techniques presented here can be easily adopted to prove analogous results for other cryptographic tasks.