We know that trapdoor permutations can be used to construct all kinds of basic cryptographic primitives, including trapdoor
functions, public-key encryption, private information retrieval, oblivious transfer, key agreement, and those known to be
equivalent to one-way functions such as digital signature, private-key encryption, bit commitment, pseudo-random generator
and pseudo-random functions. On the other hand, trapdoor functions are not as powerful as trapdoor permutations, so the structural
property of permutations seem to be something special that deserves a more careful study. In this paper, we investigate the
relationships between one-way permutations and all these basic cryptographic primitives. Following previous work, we focus
on an important type of reductions called black-box reductions. We prove that no such reductions exist from one-way permutations
to either trapdoor functions or private information retrieval. Together with previous results, all the relationships with
one-way permutations have now been established, and we know that no such reductions exist from one-way permutations to any
of these primitives except trapdoor permutations. This may have the following meaning, with respect to black-box reductions.
We know that one-way permutations imply none of the primitives in “public cryptography”, where additional properties are required
on top of “one-wayness” [12], so permutations cannot be traded for any of these additional properties. On the other hand, we now know that none of these
additional properties can be traded for permutations either. Thus, permutation seems to be something orthogonal to those additional
properties on top of one-wayness. Like previous non-reducibility results [12, 23, 17, 7, 9, 8, 6], our proofs follow the oracle separation paradigm of Impagliazzo and Rudich [12].