We survey the computational foundations for public-key cryptography. We discuss the computational assumptions that have been used as bases for public-key encryption schemes, and the types of evidence we have for the veracity of these assumptions.

This is a survey that appeared in a book of surveys in honor of ... more >>>

Subspace designs are a (large) collection of high-dimensional subspaces $\{H_i\}$ of $\F_q^m$ such that for any low-dimensional subspace $W$, only a small number of subspaces from the collection have non-trivial intersection with $W$; more precisely, the sum of dimensions of $W \cap H_i$ is at most some parameter $L$. The ... more >>>

The gap-ETH assumption (Dinur 2016; Manurangsi and Raghavendra 2016) asserts that it is exponentially-hard to distinguish between a satisfiable 3-CNF formula and a 3-CNF formula which is at most 0.99-satisfiable. We show that this assumption follows from the exponential hardness of finding a satisfying assignment for *smooth* 3-CNFs. Here smoothness ... more >>>