In the last few days, a Denial of Service attack was launched on universities in Israel, leading the administrators of the Israel Academic network to block access to it from the global internet. Consequently, websites such as ECCC have been accessible only from within the Israeli and European academic networks.
It seems that this blocking was just removed, and we hope it will not be put back in the future.
Needless to say, deciding on such blocking is not in our control, but we do apologize for this disruption of service.
Private information retrieval (PIR) inherently requires public-key cryptography. A recent line of work suggests that this barrier can be avoided in secret-key PIR, where the client first preprocesses an N-bit database and retains only a short secret key. This line of work has yielded communication O(N^\epsilon) for any constant \epsilon ... more >>>
An outstanding open problem asks if there exists a boolean matrix with unbounded sign-rank, but bounded randomised communication complexity. We make progress towards this question by proving lower bounds against real linear sketches (a model weaker than sign-rank): Alice and Bob send few linear measurements to a referee, who makes ... more >>>
Cryptographic combiners take $n$ candidate schemes for some primitive $P$, and realize it securely provided that at least $k$ candidates are secure. Intuitively, we expect that if we plug $n$ independent instances of a $\delta$-weak candidate for $P$ into the combiner, assuming $\delta \ll (n-k)/n$, security should be amplified and ... more >>>
