Explicit Non-Malleable Extractors, Multi-Source Extractors and Almost Optimal Privacy Amplification Protocols

We make progress in the following three problems: 1. Constructing optimal seeded non-malleable extractors; 2. Constructing optimal privacy amplification protocols with an active adversary, for any security parameter; 3. Constructing extractors for independent weak random sources, when the min-entropy is extremely small (i.e., near logarithmic). For the first two problems, the best known non-malleable extractors by Chattopadhyay, Goyal and Li [CGL16], and by Cohen [Coh16a,Coh16b] all require seed length and min-entropy at least $\log^2 (1/ε)$, where $ε$ is the error of the extractor. As a result, the best known explicit privacy amplification protocols with an active adversary, which achieve 2 rounds of communication and optimal entropy loss in [Li15c,CGL16], can only handle security parameter up to $s=Ω(\sqrt{k})$, where $k$ is the min-entropy of the shared secret weak random source. For larger $s$ the best known protocol with optimal entropy loss in [Li15c] requires $O(s/\sqrt{k})$ rounds of communication. In this paper we give an explicit non-malleable extractor that only requires seed length and min-entropy $\log^{1+o(1)} (n/ε)$, which also yields a 2-round privacy amplification protocol with optimal entropy loss for security parameter up to $s=k^{1-α}$ for any constant $α>0$. For the third problem, previously the best known extractor which supports the smallest min-entropy due to Li [Li13a], requires min-entropy $\log^{2+δ} n$ and uses $O(1/δ)$ sources, for any constant $δ>0$. A very recent result by Cohen and Schulman [CS16] improves this, and constructed explicit extractors that use $O(1/δ)$ sources for min-entropy $\log^{1+δ} n$, any constant $δ>0$. In this paper we further improve their result, and give an explicit extractor that uses $O(1)$ (an absolute constant) sources for min-entropy $\log^{1+o(1)} n$.