SPEAKER:
Kai Min Chung

TITLE:
Interactive Coding, Revisited

Abstract:

How can we encode a communication protocol between two parties to
become resilient to adversarial errors on the communication channel?
This question dates back to the seminal works of Shannon and Hamming
from the 1940's, initiating the study of error-correcting codes (ECC).
But, even if we encode each message in the communication protocol with
a "good" ECC, the error rate of the encoded protocol becomes poor
(namely O(1/m) where m is the number of communication rounds). Towards
addressing this issue, Schulman (FOCS'92, STOC'93) introduced the
notion of interactive coding. We argue that whereas the method of
separately encoding each message with an ECC ensures that the encoded
protocol carries the same amount of information as the original
protocol, this may no longer be the case if using interactive coding.
In particular, the encoded protocol may completely leak a player's
private input, even if it would remain secret in the original
protocol. Towards addressing this problem, we introduce the notion of
knowledge-preserving interactive coding, where the interactive coding
protocol is required to preserve the "knowledge" transmitted in the
original protocol. Our main results are as follows.

o The method of separately applying ECCs to each message is
essentially optimal: No knowledge-preserving interactive coding scheme
can have an error rate of 1/m, where m is the number of rounds in the
original protocol.

o If restricting to computationally-bounded (polynomial-time)
adversaries, then assuming the existence of one-way functions (resp.,
subexponentially- hard one-way functions), for every eps > 0, there
exists a knowledge-preserving interactive coding schemes with constant
error rate and information rate n^eps (resp. 1/polylog(n)) where n is
the security parameter; additionally to achieve an error of even 1/m
requires the existence of one-way functions.

o Finally, even if we restrict to computationally-bounded adversaries,
knowledge-preserving interactive coding schemes with constant error
rate can have an information rate of at most o(1/ log n). This results
applies even to non-constructive interactive coding schemes.

Joint work with Rafael Pass and Sidharth Telang.