Relaxed Locally Correctable Codes in Computationally Bounded Channels

Abstract

Error-correcting codes that admit local decoding and correcting algorithms have been the focus of much recent research due to their numerous theoretical and practical applications. An important goal is to obtain the best possible tradeoffs between the number of queries the algorithm makes to its oracle (the locality of the task), and the amount of redundancy in the encoding (the information rate). In Hamming's classical adversarial channel model, the current tradeoffs are dramatic, allowing either small locality, but superpolynomial blocklength, or small blocklength, but high locality. However, in the computationally bounded, adversarial channel model, proposed by Lipton (STACS 1994), constructions of locally decodable codes suddenly exhibit small locality and small blocklength, but these constructions require strong trusted setup assumptions e.g., Ostrovsky, Pandey and Sahai (ICALP 2007) construct private locally decodable codes in the setting where the sender and receiver already share a symmetric key. We study variants of locally decodable and locally correctable codes in computationally bounded, adversarial channels, in a setting with no public-key or private-key cryptographic setup. The only setup assumption we require is the selection of the public parameters (seed) for a collision-resistant hash function. Specifically, we provide constructions of relaxed locally correctable and relaxed locally decodable codes over the binary alphabet, with constant information rate, and poly-logarithmic locality. Our constructions, which compare favorably with their classical analogues in the computationally unbounded Hamming channel, crucially employ collision-resistant hash functions and local expander graphs, extending ideas from recent cryptographic constructions of memory-hard functions.