Paper 2025/324

Fine-Grained Complexity in a World without Cryptography

Abstract

The study of fine-grained cryptography has proliferated in recent years due to its allure of potentially relying on weaker assumptions compared to standard cryptography. As fine-grained cryptography only requires polynomial gaps between the adversary and honest parties, it seems plausible to build primitives relying upon popular hardness assumptions about problems in $$ such as $$-$$ or $$-$$-$$. The ultimate hope is that fine-grained cryptography could still be viable even if all current cryptographic assumptions are false, such as if $$ or if we live in Pessiland where one-way functions do not exist. In our work, we consider whether this approach is viable by studying fine-grained complexity when all standard cryptographic assumptions are false. As our main result, we show that many popular fine-grained complexity problems are easy to solve in the average-case when one-way functions do not exist. In other words, many candidate hardness assumptions for building fine-grained cryptography are no longer options in Pessiland. As an example, we prove that the average-case $$-$$ and $$-$$-$$ conjectures are false for sufficiently large constant $$ when no one-way functions exist. The average-case $$-$$-$$ assumption was used to build fine-grained key-exchange by Lavigne et al. [CRYPTO'19]. One can also view the contrapositive of our result as providing an explicit construction of one-way functions assuming $$ average-case hardness of $$-$$ or $$-$$-$$ for all constant $$. We also show that barriers for reductions in fine-grained complexity may be explained by problems in cryptography. First, we show that finding faster algorithms for computing discrete logarithms is equivalent to designing average-case equivalence between $$-$$ and $$-$$ (an extension of $$-$$ to cyclic groups). In particular, finding such a reduction from $$-$$ to $$-$$ could potentially lead to breakthrough algorithms for the discrete logarithm, factoring, RSA and quadratic residuosity problems. Finally, we show that discrete logarithms with preprocessing may be reduced to the $$-$$-$$ problem, and we present faster algorithms for average-case $$-$$-$$ and $$-$$-$$.