Capacity of Non-Malleable Codes

Non-malleable codes, introduced by Dziembowski et al., encode messages s in a manner, so that tampering the codeword causes the decoder to either output s or a message that is independent of s. While this is an impossible goal to achieve against unrestricted tampering functions, rather surprisingly non-malleable coding becomes possible against every fixed family P of tampering functions that is not too large (for instance, when I≤I 22αn for some α <; 1, where n is the number of bits in a codeword). In this paper, we study the capacity of non-malleable codes, and establish optimal bounds on the achievable rate as a function of the family size, answering an open problem from Dziembowski et al. Specifically, We prove that for every family P with IFI I≤I 22αn, there exist non-malleable codes against P with rate arbitrarily close to 1-α [this is achieved with high probability (w.h.p.) by a randomized construction]. We show the existence of families of size exp(nO(1)2αn) against which there is no non-malleable code of rate 1 - α (in fact this is the case w.h.p for a random family of this size). We also show that 1 - α is the best achievable rate for the family of functions, which are only allowed to tamper the first αn bits of the codeword, which is of special interest. As a corollary, this implies that the capacity of non-malleable coding in the split-state model (where the tampering function acts independently but arbitrarily on the two halves of the codeword, a model which has received some attention recently) equals 1/2. We also give an efficient Monte Carlo construction of codes of rate close to 1 with polynomial time encoding and decoding that is non-malleable against any fixed c > 0 and family P of size 2nc, in particular tampering functions with, say, cubic size circuits.