1,720,991 research outputs found
Black-Box Uselessness: Composing Separations in Cryptography
Get PDFBlack-box separations have been successfully used to identify the limits of a powerful set of tools in cryptography, namely those of black-box reductions. They allow proving that a large set of techniques are not capable of basing one primitive on another . Such separations, however, do not say anything about the power of the combination of primitives ₁,₂ for constructing , even if cannot be based on ₁ or ₂ alone.
By introducing and formalizing the notion of black-box uselessness, we develop a framework that allows us to make such conclusions. At an informal level, we call primitive black-box useless (BBU) for if cannot help constructing in a black-box way, even in the presence of another primitive . This is formalized by saying that is BBU for if for any auxiliary primitive , whenever there exists a black-box construction of from (,), then there must already also exist a black-box construction of from alone. We also formalize various other notions of black-box uselessness, and consider in particular the setting of efficient black-box constructions when the number of queries to is below a threshold.
Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC'89) initiated the study of black-box separations by separating key agreement from one-way functions. We prove a number of initial results in this direction, which indicate that one-way functions are perhaps also black-box useless for key agreement. In particular, we show that OWFs are black-box useless in any construction of key agreement in either of the following settings: (1) the key agreement has perfect correctness and one of the parties calls the OWF a constant number of times; (2) the key agreement consists of a single round of interaction (as in Merkle-type protocols). We conjecture that OWFs are indeed black-box useless for general key agreement.
We also show that certain techniques for proving black-box separations can be lifted to the uselessness regime. In particular, we show that the lower bounds of Canetti, Kalai, and Paneth (TCC'15) as well as Garg, Mahmoody, and Mohammed (Crypto'17 & TCC'17) for assumptions behind indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) can be extended to derive black-box uselessness of a variety of primitives for obtaining (approximately correct) IO. These results follow the so-called "compiling out" technique, which we prove to imply black-box uselessness.
Eventually, we study the complementary landscape of black-box uselessness, namely black-box helpfulness. We put forth the conjecture that one-way functions are black-box helpful for building collision-resistant hash functions. We define two natural relaxations of this conjecture, and prove that both of these conjectures are implied by a natural conjecture regarding random permutations equipped with a collision finder oracle, as defined by Simon (Eurocrypt'98). This conjecture may also be of interest in other contexts, such as amplification of hardness
The Related-Key Security of Iterated Even–Mansour Ciphers
Get PDFpooya.farshim @ gmail.com gordon.procter.2011 @ live.rhul.ac.uk Abstract. The simplicity and widespread use of blockciphers based on the iterated Even–Mansour (EM) construction has sparked recent interest in the theoretical study of their security. Previous work has established their strong pseudorandom permutation and indifferentiability properties, with some matching lower bounds presented to demonstrate tightness. In this work we initiate the study of the EM ciphers under related-key attacks which, despite extensive prior work, has received little attention. We show that the simplest one-round EM cipher is strong enough to achieve non-trivial levels of RKA security even under chosen-ciphertext attacks. This class, however, does not include the practically relevant case of offsetting keys by constants. We show that two rounds suffice to reach this level under chosen-plaintext attacks and that three rounds can boost security to resist chosen-ciphertext attacks. We also formalize how indifferentiability relates to RKA security, showing strong positive results despite counterexamples presented for indifferentiability in multi-stage games
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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