One-Way Functions vs. TFNP: Simpler and Improved

Simon (1998) proved that it is impossible to construct collision-resistant hash functions from one-way functions using a black-box reduction. It is conjectured more generally that one-way functions do not imply, via a black-box reduction, the hardness of any total NP search problem (collision-resistant hash functions being just one such example). We make progress towards this conjecture by ruling out a large class of "single-query" reductions. In particular, we improve over the prior work of Hubá ek et al. (2020) in two ways: our result is established via a novel simpler combinatorial technique and applies to a broader class of semi black-box reductions.