Pseudorandomness and cryptographic applications

by Michael George Luby

"A pseudorandom generator is an easy-to-compute function that stretches a short random string into a much longer string that "looks" just like a random string to any efficient adversary. One immediate application of a pseudorandom generator is the construction of a private key cryptosystem that is secure against chosen plaintext attack."--BOOK JACKET. "There do not seem to be natural examples of functions that are pseudorandom generators. On the other hand, there do seem to be a variety of natural examples of another basic primitive: the one-way function. A function is one-way if it is easy to compute but hard for any efficient adversary to invert on average."--BOOK JACKET. "The first half of the book shows how to construct a pseudorandom generator from any one-way function. Building on this, the second half of the book shows how to construct other useful cryptographic primitives, such as private key cryptosystems, pseudorandom function generators, pseudorandom permutation generators,