Wyner's Wire-Tap Channel, Forty Years Later

by Leonid Reyzin
 

Wyner's information theory paper "The Wire-Tap Channel" turns forty in 2015. Its importance is underappreciated in cryptography, where its intellectual progeny includes pseudorandom generators, privacy amplification, information reconciliation, and many flavors of randomness extractors (including plain, strong, fuzzy, robust, nonmalleable, source-private, local, and reusable). Focusing mostly on privacy amplification and fuzzy extractors, this talk demonstrates the connection from Wyner's paper to today's research, including work on program obfuscation.

This talk was originally given at Twelfth IACR Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2015) in March of 2015; different versions of it were given at other venues later. The slides contain the union of the contents of those talks. In particular, the slides explain my work on fuzzy extractors, including papers Reusable Fuzzy Extractors for Low-Entropy Distributions and When are Fuzzy Extractors Possible?.