English

The Observer World: A Cryptographic Extension of Impagliazzo's Five Worlds

Cryptography and Security 2026-06-25 v1 Computational Complexity

Abstract

Impagliazzo's five worlds classify computational assumptions along a single axis, the existence of cryptographic primitives. All five worlds implicitly assume that every party, including the adversary, observes the full input, that the observer is always OtopO_{top}. This assumption is so natural that it is never stated. This work makes it explicit and relaxes it by introducing a second, orthogonal axis, the observational axis, defined by the observer hierarchy introduced in previous work. Relaxing the assumption reveals structural phenomena, such as the collapse POprof=NPOprofPP^{O_{prof}} = NP^{O_{prof}} \subset P, that the five-world framework cannot express. We prove that this collapse holds unconditionally in all five worlds, showing that observational blindness and computational hardness are independent. We define the Observer World WOW_O, classify all world-observer pairs, identify the labeled cells (a)--(d), and introduce a parametric family WOεW_O^{\varepsilon} modelling partial violations of observational invariants. The framework also interfaces with physical information limits, including thermodynamic, quantum, and cosmological bounds.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.27139,
  title  = {The Observer World: A Cryptographic Extension of Impagliazzo's Five Worlds},
  author = {Fabio F. G. Buono},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.27139},
  year   = {2026}
}