arXiv subjects

Andrew C. Yao

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew C. Yao.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis

Printing custom DNA sequences is essential to scientific and biomedical research, but the technology can be used to manufacture plagues as well as cures. Just as ink printers recognize and reject attempts to counterfeit money, DNA synthesizers and assemblers should deny unauthorized requests to make viral DNA that could be misused. There are three complications. First, we don't need to quickly update printers to deal with newly discovered currencies, whereas we regularly learn of new potential pandemic viruses and other biological threats. Second, convincing counterfeit bills can't be printed in small pieces and taped together, while preventing the distributed synthesis and subsequent re-assembly of controlled sequences will require tracking which DNA fragments have been ordered across all providers and benchtop devices while protecting legitimate customer privacy. Finally, counterfeiting can at worst undermine faith in currency, whereas unauthorized DNA synthesis could be used to deliberately cause pandemics. Here we describe SecureDNA, a free, privacy-preserving, and fully automated system capable of verifiably screening all DNA synthesis orders of 30+ nucleotides against an up-to-date database of controlled sequences, and its operational performance and specificity when applied to 67 million nucleotides of DNA synthesized by providers in the United States, Europe, and China.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2011

A New Family of Practical Non-Malleable Diffie-Hellman Protocols

Cryptography algorithm standards play a key role both to the practice of information security and to cryptography theory research. Among them, the MQV and HMQV protocols ((H)MQV, in short) are a family of (implicitly authenticated) Diffie-Hellman key-exchange (DHKE) protocols that are widely standardized and deployed. In this work, from some new perspectives and approaches and under some new design rationales and insights, we develop a new family of practical implicitly authenticated DHKE protocols, which enjoy notable performance among security, privacy, efficiency and easy deployment. We make detailed comparisons between our new DHKE protocols and (H)MQV, showing that the newly developed protocols outperform HMQV in most aspects. Along the way, guided by our new design rationales, we also identify a new vulnerability (H)MQV, which brings some new perspectives (e.g., computational fairness) to the literature.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2009

Adaptive Concurrent Non-Malleability with Bare Public-Keys

Concurrent non-malleability (CNM) is central for cryptographic protocols running concurrently in environments such as the Internet. In this work, we formulate CNM in the bare public-key (BPK) model, and show that round-efficient concurrent non-malleable cryptography with full adaptive input selection can be established, in general, with bare public-keys (where, in particular, no trusted assumption is made). Along the way, we clarify the various subtleties of adaptive concurrent non-malleability in the bare public-key model.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2009

Concurrent Knowledge-Extraction in the Public-Key Model

Knowledge extraction is a fundamental notion, modelling machine possession of values (witnesses) in a computational complexity sense. The notion provides an essential tool for cryptographic protocol design and analysis, enabling one to argue about the internal state of protocol players without ever looking at this supposedly secret state. However, when transactions are concurrent (e.g., over the Internet) with players possessing public-keys (as is common in cryptography), assuring that entities ``know'' what they claim to know, where adversaries may be well coordinated across different transactions, turns out to be much more subtle and in need of re-examination. Here, we investigate how to formally treat knowledge possession by parties (with registered public-keys) interacting over the Internet. Stated more technically, we look into the relative power of the notion of ``concurrent knowledge-extraction'' (CKE) in the concurrent zero-knowledge (CZK) bare public-key (BPK) model.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2008

Tight Approximation Ratio of a General Greedy Splitting Algorithm for the Minimum k-Way Cut Problem

For an edge-weighted connected undirected graph, the minimum $k$-way cut problem is to find a subset of edges of minimum total weight whose removal separates the graph into $k$ connected components. The problem is NP-hard when $k$ is part of the input and W[1]-hard when $k$ is taken as a parameter. A simple algorithm for approximating a minimum $k$-way cut is to iteratively increase the number of components of the graph by $h-1$, where $2 \le h \le k$, until the graph has $k$ components. The approximation ratio of this algorithm is known for $h \le 3$ but is open for $h \ge 4$. In this paper, we consider a general algorithm that iteratively increases the number of components of the graph by $h_i-1$, where $h_1 \le h_2 \le ... \le h_q$ and $\sum_{i=1}^q (h_i-1) = k-1$. We prove that the approximation ratio of this general algorithm is $2 - (\sum_{i=1}^q {h_i \choose 2})/{k \choose 2}$, which is tight. Our result implies that the approximation ratio of the simple algorithm is $2-h/k + O(h^2/k^2)$ in general and $2-h/k$ if $k-1$ is a multiple of $h-1$.

cs.DS↗

arXiv1999

NQP_{C} = co-C_{=}P

Adleman, DeMarrais, and Huang introduced the nondeterministic quantum polynomial-time complexity class NQP as an analogue of NP. Fortnow and Rogers implicitly showed that, when the amplitudes are rational numbers, NQP is contained in the complement of C_{=}P. Fenner, Green, Homer, and Pruim improved this result by showing that, when the amplitudes are arbitrary algebraic numbers, NQP coincides with co-C_{=}P. In this paper we prove that, even when the amplitudes are arbitrary complex numbers, NQP still remains identical to co-C_{=}P. As an immediate corollary, BQP differs from NQP when the amplitudes are unrestricted.

quant-ph↗