We exhibit an explicitly computable `pseudorandom' generator stretching $l$ bits into $m(l) = l^{\Omega(\log l)}$ bits that look random to constant-depth circuits of size $m(l)$ with $\log m(l)$ arbitrary symmetric gates (e.g. PARITY, MAJORITY). This improves on a generator by Luby, Velickovic and Wigderson (ISTCS '93) that achieves the same ... more >>>

We may believe SAT does not have small Boolean circuits.
But is it possible that some language with small circuits
looks indistiguishable from SAT to every polynomial-time
bounded adversary? We rule out this possibility. More
precisely, assuming SAT does not have small circuits, we
show that ... more >>>

In this paper we study the possibility of proving the existence of
one-way functions based on average case hardness. It is well-known
that if there exists a polynomial-time sampler that outputs
instance-solution pairs such that the distribution on the instances
is hard on average, then one-way functions exist. We study ... more >>>

One-way functions (OWFs) are central objects of study in cryptography and computational complexity theory. In a seminal work, Liu and Pass (FOCS 2020) proved that the average-case hardness of computing time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity is equivalent to the existence of OWFs. It remained an open problem to establish such an equivalence ... more >>>

We develop a general framework that characterizes strong average-case lower bounds against circuit classes $\mathcal{C}$ contained in $\mathrm{NC}^1$, such as $\mathrm{AC}^0[\oplus]$ and $\mathrm{ACC}^0$. We apply this framework to show:

- Generic seed reduction: Pseudorandom generators (PRGs) against $\mathcal{C}$ of seed length $\leq n -1$ and error $\varepsilon(n) = n^{-\omega(1)}$ can ... more >>>