arXiv subjects

Noam Ringach

Publications and source records attributed to Noam Ringach.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Improved Bounds for Coin Flipping, Leader Election, and Random Selection

Random selection, leader election, and collective coin flipping are fundamental tasks in fault-tolerant distributed computing. We study these problems in the full-information model where despite decades of study, key gaps remain in our understanding of the trade-offs between round complexity, communication per player in each round, and adversarial resilience. We make progress by proving improved bounds for these problems. We first show that any $k$-round coin flipping protocol over $\ell$ players, each player sending one bit per round, can be biased by $O(\ell/\log^{(k)}(\ell))$ bad players. We obtain a similar lower bound for leader election. This strengthens prior best bounds [RSZ, SICOMP 2002] of $O(\ell/\log^{(2k-1)}(\ell))$ for coin flipping protocols and $O(\ell/\log^{(2k+1)}(\ell))$ for leader election protocols. Our result implies that any (1-bit per player) protocol tolerating linear fraction of bad players requires at least $\log^* \ell$ rounds, showing existing protocols [RZ, JCSS 2001; F, FOCS 1999] are near-optimal. We next initiate the study of one-round, (1-bit per player) random selection. For all $m\ge (\log(\ell))^2$, we obtain an optimal protocol (a first in the full information model for any task): We construct a protocol resilient to $O(\ell / m)$ bad players that outputs $m$ uniform random bits. And, we show that any protocol that outputs $m$ uniform random bits can be corrupted using $O(\ell / m)$ bad players. This also implies a one-round leader election protocol resilient to $\ell / (\log \ell)^2$ bad players, improving the prior best protocol [RZ, JCSS 2001] which was resilient to $\ell / (\log \ell)^3$ bad players. Our resilience matches that of the best one-round coin flipping protocol by Ajtai & Linial. To obtain our lower bound, we introduce multi-output influence, an extension of influence of boolean functions to the multi-output setting.

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arXiv2024

Condensing and Extracting Against Online Adversaries

We study the tasks of deterministically condensing and extracting from Online Non-Oblivious Symbol Fixing (oNOSF) sources, a natural model of defective randomness where extraction is impossible in many parameter regimes [AORSV, EUROCRYPT'20]. A $(g,\ell)$-oNOSF source is a sequence of $\ell$ blocks where at least $g$ blocks are good (independent, with min-entropy) and the remaining bad blocks are controlled by an online adversary and can be arbitrarily correlated with prior blocks. Previously, [CGR, FOCS'24] proved impossibility of condensing beyond rate $1/2$ when $g\le 0.5 \ell$ and showed existence of condensers for when $g \ge 0.51\ell$ and $n$ is exponential in $\ell$. In this work, not only do we construct the first explicit condensers matching the existential results of [CGR, FOCS'24], but we make a doubly exponential improvement by handling the case when $g\ge 0.51\ell$ and $n$ is only polylogarithmic in $\ell$. We also obtain a much improved explicit construction for transforming low-entropy oNOSF sources into uniform oNOSF sources. Next, we essentially resolve the question of the existence of condensers for oNOSF sources by showing the existence of condensers even when $n$ is a large enough constant and $\ell$ is growing (provided $g \ge 0.51\ell$). We apply our condensers to collective coin flipping and collective sampling, widely studied problems in fault-tolerant distributed computing, and provide very simple protocols for them. Finally, we study the possibility of extraction from oNOSF sources. For lower bounds, we introduce the notion of online influence - extending the notion of influence of boolean functions - and establish tight bounds that imply extraction lower bounds. We also construct explicit extractors via leader election protocols that beat standard resilient functions [AL, Combinatorica'93].

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arXiv2024

Two-Sided Lossless Expanders in the Unbalanced Setting

We present the first explicit construction of two-sided lossless expanders in the unbalanced setting (bipartite graphs that have polynomially many more nodes on the left than on the right). Prior to our work, all known explicit constructions in the unbalanced setting achieved only one-sided lossless expansion. Specifically, we show that the one-sided lossless expanders constructed by Kalev and Ta-Shma (RANDOM'22) -- that are based on multiplicity codes introduced by Kopparty, Saraf, and Yekhanin (STOC'11) -- are, in fact, two-sided lossless expanders. Moreover, we show that our result is tight, thus completely characterizing the graph of Kalev and Ta-Shma. Using our unbalanced bipartite expander, we easily obtain lossless (non-bipartite) expander graphs on $N$ vertices with polynomial degree $\ll N$ and expanding sets of size $N^{0.49}$.

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arXiv2023

On the Existence of Seedless Condensers: Exploring the Terrain

We prove several new results for seedless condensers in the context of three related classes of sources: Non-Oblivious Symbol Fixing (NOSF) sources, online NOSF (oNOSF) sources [AORSV, EUROCRYPT'20], and adversarial Chor-Goldreich (aCG) source [DMOZ, STOC'23]. We think of these sources as a sequence of random variables $\mathbf{X}=\mathbf{X}_1,\dots,\mathbf{X}_\ell$ on $\ell$ symbols where at least $g$ out of these $\ell$ symbols are "good" (i.e., have some min-entropy requirement), denoted as a $(g,\ell)$-source, and the remaining "bad" $\ell-g$ symbols may adversarially depend on these $g$ good blocks. The difference between each of these sources is realized by restrictions on the power of the adversary. Prior to our work, the only known seedless condenser upper or lower bound in these settings is due to [DMOZ, STOC'23], where they explicitly construct a seedless condenser for a restricted subset of $(g,\ell)$-aCG sources. We show: 1) oNOSF sources a) When $g\leq\ell/2$, we prove that condensing with error 0.99 above rate $\frac{1}{\lfloor \ell/g \rfloor}$ is impossible. In fact, we show that this is tight. b) For $g> \ell/2$, we show the existence of excellent condensers for uniform oNOSF sources. In addition, we show the existence of similar condensers for oNOSF sources with only logarithmic min-entropy. 2) aCG sources a) We observe that uniform aCG sources are equivalent to uniform oNOSF sources and consequently inherit the same results. b) We show that one cannot condense beyond the min-entropy gap of each block or condense low min-entropy CG sources above rate $1/2$. 3) NOSF sources a) We show that condensing with constant error above rate $\frac{g}{\ell}$ is impossible for uniform NOSF sources for any $g$ and $\ell$, thus ruling out the possibility of any non-trivial condensing. This shows a distinction between NOSF sources and oNOSF sources.

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