Modern Cryptography, Probabilistic Proofs and Pseudorandomness

by Oded Goldreich

You can start by putting the DO NOT DISTURB sign. Cay, in Desert Hearts (1985). The interplay between randomness and computation is one of the most fas cinating scientific phenomena uncovered in the last couple of decades. This interplay is at the heart of modern cryptography and plays a fundamental role in complexity theory at large. Specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation is pivotal to several intriguing notions of probabilistic proof systems and is the focal of the computational approach to randomness. This book provides an introduction to these three, somewhat interwoven domains (i.e., cryptography, proofs and randomness). Modern Cryptography. Whereas classical cryptography was confined to the art of designing and breaking encryption schemes (or "secrecy codes"), Modern Cryptography is concerned with the rigorous analysis of any system which should withstand malicious attempts to abuse it. We emphasize two aspects of the transition from classical to modern cryptography: ( 1) the wide ning of scope from one specific task to an utmost wide general class of tasks; and (2) the move from an engineering-art which strives on ad-hoc tricks to a scientific discipline based on rigorous approaches and techniques."

182 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 1998

About the author

Oded Goldreich is a professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. He won the Knuth Prize in 2017.

Goldreich has contributed to the development of pseudorandomness, zero knowledge proofs, secure function evaluation, property testing, and other areas in cryptography and computational complexity.

Reviews

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book lists important results in interactive proofs (including the PCP theorem) and pseudorandom number generators as of 1998, with very terse sketches of their proofs. Of course on the Web you can find papers on the subject that are much more recent, including a simpler proof of the NP = PCP(O(log n),O(1)) theorem.

I must say that the zero-knowledge proof system for NP is very cool!