One-way functions and pseudorandom generators

  • Authors:
  • L A Levin

  • Affiliations:
  • Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • STOC '85 Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

One-way are those functions which are easy to compute, but hard to invert on a non-negligible fraction of instances. The existence of such functions with some additional assumptions was shown to be sufficient for generating perfect pseudorandom strings |Blum, Micali 82|, |Yao 82|, |Goldreich, Goldwasser, Micali 84|. Below, among a few other observations, a weaker assumption about one-way functions is suggested, which is not only sufficient, but also necessary for the existence of pseudorandom generators. The main theorem can be understood without reading the sections 3-6.