How much adversarial noise can protocols for interactive communication tolerate? This question was examined by Braverman and Rao (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2014) for the case of "robust" protocols, where each party sends messages only in fixed and predetermined rounds. We consider a new class of non-robust protocols for Interactive Communication, which we call adaptive protocols. Such protocols adapt structurally to the noise induced by the channel in the sense that both the order of speaking, and the length of the protocol may vary depending on observed noise. We define models that capture adaptive protocols and study upper and lower bounds on the permissible noise rate in these models. When the length of the protocol may adaptively change according to the noise, we demonstrate a protocol that tolerates noise rates up to @math . When the order of speaking may adaptively change as well, we demonstrate a protocol that tolerates noise rates up to @math . Hence, adaptivity circumvents an impossibility result of @math on the fraction of tolerable noise (Braverman and Rao, 2014).
  Consider two parties Alice and Bob, who hold private inputs x and y, and wish to compute a function f(x, y) privately in the information theoretic sense; that is, each party should learn nothing beyond f(x, y). However, the communication channel available to them is noisy. This means that the channel can introduce errors in the transmission between the two parties. Moreover, the channel is adversarial in the sense that it knows the protocol that Alice and Bob are running, and maliciously introduces errors to disrupt the communication, subject to some bound on the total number of errors. A fundamental question in this setting is to design a protocol that remains private in the presence of large number of errors. If Alice and Bob are only interested in computing f(x, y) correctly, and not privately, then quite robust protocols are known that can tolerate a constant fraction of errors. However, none of these solutions is applicable in the setting of privacy, as they inherently leak information about the parties' inputs. This leads to the question whether we can simultaneously achieve privacy and error-resilience against a constant fraction of errors. We show that privacy and error-resilience are contradictory goals. In particular, we show that for every constant c > 0, there exists a function f which is privately computable in the error-less setting, but for which no private and correct protocol is resilient against a c-fraction of errors. The same impossibility holds also for sub-constant noise rate, e.g., when c is exponentially small (as a function of the input size).    We consider the task of interactive communication in the presence of adversarial errors and present tight bounds on the tolerable error-rates in a number of different settings. Most significantly, we explore adaptive interactive communication where the communicating parties decide who should speak next based on the history of the interaction. Braverman and Rao [STOC'11] show that non-adaptively one can code for any constant error rate below 1 4 but not more. They asked whether this bound could be improved using adaptivity. We answer this open question in the affirmative (with a slightly different collection of resources): Our adaptive coding scheme tolerates any error rate below 2 7 and we show that tolerating a higher error rate is impossible. We also show that in the setting of [CRYPTO'13], where parties share randomness not known to the adversary, adaptivity increases the tolerable error rate from 1 2 to 2 3. For list-decodable interactive communications, where each party outputs a constant size list of possible outcomes, the tight tolerable error rate is 1 2. Our negative results hold even if the communication and computation are unbounded, whereas for our positive results communication and computation are polynomially bounded. Most prior work considered coding schemes with linear amount of communication, while allowing unbounded computations. We argue that studying tolerable error rates in this relaxed context helps to identify a setting's intrinsic optimal error rate. We set forward a strong working hypothesis which stipulates that for any setting the maximum tolerable error rate is independent of many computational and communication complexity measures. We believe this hypothesis to be a powerful guideline for the design of simple, natural, and efficient coding schemes and for understanding the (im)possibilities of coding for interactive communications.    We study coding schemes for error correction in interactive communications. Such interactive coding schemes simulate any @math -round interactive protocol using @math rounds over an adversarial channel that corrupts up to @math transmissions. Important performance measures for a coding scheme are its maximum tolerable error rate @math , communication complexity @math , and computational complexity. We give the first coding scheme for the standard setting which performs optimally in all three measures: Our randomized non-adaptive coding scheme has a near-linear computational complexity and tolerates any error rate @math with a linear @math communication complexity. This improves over prior results which each performed well in two of these measures. We also give results for other settings of interest, namely, the first computationally and communication efficient schemes that tolerate @math adaptively, @math if only one party is required to decode, and @math if list decoding is allowed. These are the optimal tolerable error rates for the respective settings. These coding schemes also have near linear computational and communication complexity. These results are obtained via two techniques: We give a general black-box reduction which reduces unique decoding, in various settings, to list decoding. We also show how to boost the computational and communication efficiency of any list decoder to become near linear.    Error correction and message authentication are well studied in the literature, and various efficient solutions have been suggested and analyzed. This is however not the case for data streams in which the message is very long, possibly infinite, and not known in advance to the sender. Trivial solutions for error-correcting and authenticating data streams either suffer from a long delay at the receiver’s end or cannot perform well when the communication channel is noisy.  We provide the first capacity approaching coding schemes that robustly simulate any interactive protocol over an adversarial channel that corrupts any @math fraction of the transmitted symbols. Our coding schemes achieve a communication rate of @math over any adversarial channel. This can be improved to @math for random, oblivious, and computationally bounded channels, or if parties have shared randomness unknown to the channel. Surprisingly, these rates exceed the @math interactive channel capacity bound which [Kol and Raz; STOC'13] recently proved for random errors. We conjecture @math and @math to be the optimal rates for their respective settings and therefore to capture the interactive channel capacity for random and adversarial errors. In addition to being very communication efficient, our randomized coding schemes have multiple other advantages. They are computationally efficient, extremely natural, and significantly simpler than prior (non-capacity approaching) schemes. In particular, our protocols do not employ any coding but allow the original protocol to be performed as-is, interspersed only by short exchanges of hash values. When hash values do not match, the parties backtrack. Our approach is, as we feel, by far the simplest and most natural explanation for why and how robust interactive communication in a noisy environment is possible. 