The seminal result of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC 1989) gave a black-box separation between one-way functions and public-key encryption: informally, a public-key encryption scheme cannot be constructed using one-way functions as the sole source of computational hardness. In addition, this implied a black-box separation between one-way functions and protocols for ... more >>>

The class TFNP is the search analog of NP with the additional guarantee that any instance has a solution. TFNP has attracted extensive attention due to its natural syntactic subclasses that capture the computational complexity of important search problems from algorithmic game theory, combinatorial optimization and computational topology. Thus, one ... more >>>

Computational analogues of information-theoretic notions have given rise to some of the most interesting phenomena in the theory of computation. For example, computational indistinguishability, Goldwasser and Micali '84, which is the computational analogue of statistical distance, enabled the bypassing of Shanon's impossibility results on perfectly secure encryption, and provided the ... more >>>

Meta-complexity studies the complexity of computational problems about complexity theory, such as the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) and its variants. We show that a relativization barrier applies to many important open questions in meta-complexity. We give relativized worlds where:

* MCSP can be solved in deterministic polynomial time, but ... more >>>