A PRG (resp. UOWHF) construction based on black-box access is a machine that is given oracle access to a permutation. Whenever the permutation is hard to invert, the construction is hard to break. In this paper we give lower bounds on the number of invocations to the oracle by the construction.
If $S$ is the assumed security of the oracle permutation $\pi$ (i.e. no adversary of size $S$ can invert $\pi$ on a fraction larger than $1/S$ of its inputs) then a PRG (resp. UOWHF) construction that stretches (resp. compresses) its input by $k$ bits must query $\pi$ in $q=\Omega(k/\log S)$ points. This matches known constructions.
Our results are given in an extension of the Impagliazzo-Rudich model. That is, we prove that a proof of the existence of PRG (resp. UOWHF) black-box constructions that beat our lower bound would imply a proof of the unconditional existence of such construction (which would also imply $P \neq NP$).
Category / Keywords: foundations / complexity theory, one-way functions, pseudo-randomness, hash functions, lower bounds Date: received 2 May 2000 Contact author: rosario at watson ibm com Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20000502:210931 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2000/017 Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion