Exact Hidden Paths in Noisy High Dimensional Path Spaces

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical and cryptographic framework for the exact recovery of noisy hidden paths in high-dimensional discrete spaces, inspired by path integral concepts.

Contribution

It introduces formal recovery notions and analyzes attack surfaces, laying groundwork for future cryptographic applications based on hidden path recovery.

Findings

Formalized various recovery notions including exact and approximate recovery.

Analyzed multiple attack strategies such as lattice, quantum, and SAT-based methods.

Highlighted the distinction between coarse geometric recovery and exact microscopic path recovery.

Abstract

We introduce a mathematical and cryptographic framework for exact recovery of noisy hidden paths in high dimensional discrete path spaces. The work is inspired by the path integral viewpoint, where global quantities arise from contributions over many possible trajectories. Instead of approximating a global path sum, we study the inverse problem of recovering one exact hidden trajectory from incomplete, noisy, projected, and aggregated observables. The hidden object is a planted discrete path whose transitions may include macro steps, microscopic perturbations, and discrete noise. Public information is represented by large observable vectors rather than short hash digests, since excessive compression would bound the effective recovery problem by the digest size. We formalize several recovery notions, including planted exact recovery, arbitrary witness recovery, canonical recovery, quotient recovery, and recovery of derived encodings. The main distinction is that approximate reconstruction and exact recovery are fundamentally different tasks. A method may reveal coarse geometry or dominant regions without recovering the precise microscopic sequence defining the hidden path. We also discuss attack surfaces relevant to future cryptographic use, including linearization, lattice style recovery, dynamic programming, meet in the middle attacks, SAT and SMT formulations, approximation followed by rounding, witness collisions, and generic quantum search. This work does not claim a complete post quantum cryptosystem. It provides a formal framework for studying exact hidden path recovery as a possible foundation for future cryptographic constructions