Hardness amplification of weakly verifiable puzzles

Ran Canetti*, Shai Halevi, Michael Steiner

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

49 Scopus citations

Abstract

Is it harder to solve many puzzles than it is to solve just one? This question has different answers, depending on how you define puzzles. For the case of inverting one-way functions it was shown by Yao that solving many independent instances simultaneously is indeed harder than solving a single instance (cf. the transformation from weak to strong one-way functions). The known proofs of that result, however, use in an essential way the fact that for one-way functions, verifying candidate solutions to a given puzzle is easy. We extend this result to the case where solutions are efficiently verifiable only by the party that generated the puzzle. We call such puzzles weakly verifiable. That is, for weakly verifiable puzzles we show that if no efficient algorithm can solve a single puzzle with probability more than ε, then no efficient algorithm can solve n independent puzzles simultaneously with probability more than εn. We also demonstrate that when the puzzles are not even weakly verifiable, solving many puzzles may be no harder than solving a single one. Hardness amplification of weakly verifiable puzzles turns out to be closely related to the reduction of soundness error under parallel repetition in computationally sound arguments. Indeed, the proof of Bellare, Impagliazzo and Naor that parallel repetition reduces soundness error in three-round argument systems implies a result similar to our first result, albeit with considerably worse parameters. Also, our second result is an adaptation of their proof that parallel repetition of four-round systems may not reduce the soundness error.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)17-33
Number of pages17
JournalLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume3378
DOIs
StatePublished - 2005
Externally publishedYes
EventSecond Theory of Cryptography Conference, TCC 2005 - Cambridge, MA, United States
Duration: 10 Feb 200512 Feb 2005

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Hardness amplification of weakly verifiable puzzles'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this