[Resource Topic] 2019/686: On the Complexity of Collision Resistant Hash Functions: New and Old Black-Box Separations

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Title:
On the Complexity of Collision Resistant Hash Functions: New and Old Black-Box Separations

Authors: Nir Bitansky, Akshay Degwekar

Abstract:

The complexity of collision-resistant hash functions has been long studied in the theory of cryptography. While we often think about them as a Minicrypt primitive, black-box separations demonstrate that constructions from one-way functions are unlikely. Indeed, theoretical constructions of collision-resistant hash functions are based on rather structured assumptions. We make two contributions to this study: 1. A New Separation: We show that collision-resistant hashing does not imply hard problems in the class Statistical Zero Knowledge in a black-box way. 2. New Proofs: We show new proofs for the results of Simon, ruling out black-box reductions of collision-resistant hashing to one-way permutations, and of Asharov and Segev, ruling out black-box reductions to indistinguishability obfuscation. The new proofs are quite different from the previous ones and are based on simple coupling arguments.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/686

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