High entropy random selection protocols

Harry Buhrman, Matthias Christandl, Michal Koucký, Zvi Lotker, Boaz Patt-Shamir, Nikolai Vereshchagin

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    4 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    We study the two party problem of randomly selecting a string among all the strings of length n. We want the protocol to have the property that the output distribution has high entropy, even when one of the two parties is dishonest and deviates from the protocol. We develop protocols that achieve high, close to n, entropy. In the literature the randomness guarantee is usually expressed as being close to the uniform distribution or in terms of resiliency. The notion of entropy is not directly comparable to that of resiliency, but we establish a connection between the two that allows us to compare our protocols with the existing ones. We construct an explicit protocol that yields entropy n-O(1) and has 4 log* n rounds, improving over the protocol of Goldreich et al. (3] that also achieves this entropy but needs O(n) rounds. Both these protocols need O(n2) bits of communication. Next we reduce the communication in our protocols. We show the existence, non-explicitly, of a protocol that has 6 rounds, 2n+8 log n bits of communication and yields entropy n - O(log n) and min-entropy n/2 - O(log n). Our protocol achieves the same entropy bound as the recent, also non-explicit, protocol of Gradwohl et al. [4], however achieves much higher min-entropy: n/2 - O(log n) versus O(log n). Finally we exhibit very simple explicit protocols. We connect the security parameter of these geometric protocols with the well studied Kakeya problem motivated by harmonic analysis and analytical number theory. We are only able to prove that these protocols have entropy 3n/4 but still n/2 - O(log n) min-entropy. Therefore they do not perform as well with respect to the explicit constructions of Gradwohl et al. [4] entropy-wise, but still have much better minentropy. We conjecture that these simple protocols achieve n - o(n) entropy. Our geometric construction and its relation to the Kakeya problem follows a new and different approach to the random selection problem than any of the previously known protocols.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationApproximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization
    Subtitle of host publicationAlgorithms and Techniques - 10th International Workshop, APPROX 2007 and 11th International Workshop, RANDOM 2007, Proceedings
    PublisherSpringer Verlag
    Pages366-379
    Number of pages14
    ISBN (Print)9783540742074
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 1 Jan 2007
    Event10th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, APPROX 2007 and 11th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation, RANDOM 2007 - Princeton, NJ, United States
    Duration: 20 Aug 200722 Aug 2007

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume4627 LNCS
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Conference

    Conference10th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, APPROX 2007 and 11th International Workshop on Randomization and Computation, RANDOM 2007
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityPrinceton, NJ
    Period20/08/0722/08/07

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Theoretical Computer Science
    • General Computer Science

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