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arXiv:2209.11300 · PRX Quantum

Noninteractive xor Quantum Oblivious Transfer: Optimal Protocols and Their Experimental Implementations

Lara Stroh, Nikola Horová, Robert Stárek, Ittoop Vergheese Puthoor, Michal Mičuda, Miloslav Dušek, Erika Andersson

Published May 4, 2023• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Oblivious transfer (OT) is an important cryptographic primitive.Any multiparty computation can be realized with OT as building block.XOR oblivious transfer (XOT) is a variant where the sender Alice has two bits and a receiver Bob obtains either the first bit, the second bit, or their XOR.Bob should not learn anything more than this and Alice should not learn what Bob has learnt.Perfect quantum OT with information-theoretic security is known to be impossible.We determine the smallest possible cheating probabilities for unrestricted dishonest parties in noninteractive quantum XOT protocols using symmetric pure states and present an optimal protocol, which outperforms classical protocols.We also "reverse" this protocol, so that Bob becomes sender of a quantum state and Alice the receiver who measures it, while still implementing oblivious transfer from Alice to Bob.Cheating probabilities for both parties stay the same as for the unreversed protocol.We optically implement both the unreversed and the reversed protocols, and cheating strategies, noting that the reversed protocol is easier to implement.

DOI
10.1103/prxquantum.4.020320

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Oblivious transfer (OT) is an important cryptographic primitive.Any multiparty computation can be realized with OT as building block.XOR oblivious transfer (XOT) is a variant where the sender Alice has two bits and a receiver Bob obtains either the first bit, the second bit, or their XOR.Bob should not learn anything more than this and Alice should not learn what Bob has learnt.Perfect quantum OT with information-theoretic security is known to be impossible.We determine the smallest possible cheating probabilities for unrestricted dishonest parties in noninteractive quantum XOT protocols using symmetric pure states and present an optimal protocol, which outperforms classical protocols.We also "reverse" this protocol, so that Bob becomes sender of a quantum state and Alice the receiver who measures it, while still implementing oblivious transfer from Alice to Bob.Cheating probabilities for both parties stay the same as for the unreversed protocol.We optically implement both the unreversed and the reversed protocols, and cheating strategies, noting that the reversed protocol is easier to implement.
Oblivious transfer is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that is useful for secure multiparty computation. There are several variants of oblivious transfer. We consider 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer, where a sender sends two bits of information to a receiver. The receiver receives only one of the two bits, while the sender does not know which bit the receiver has received. Perfect quantum oblivious transfer with information-theoretic security is known to be impossible. We aim to find the lowest possible cheating probabilities. Bounds on cheating probabilities have been investigated for “complete” protocols, where if both parties follow the protocol, the bit value obtained by the receiver matches the sender's bit value. We instead investigate incomplete protocols, where the receiver obtains an incorrect bit value with probability p f . We present optimal noninteractive protocols where Alice's bit values are encoded in four symmetric pure quantum states, and where she cannot cheat better than with a random guess. We find the protocols such that for a given p f , Bob's cheating probability p r is as low as possible, and vice versa. Furthermore, we show that noninteractive quantum protocols can outperform noninteractive classical protocols and give a lower bound on Bob's cheating probability in interactive quantum protocols. Importantly for optical implementations, our protocols do not require entanglement nor quantum memory.
Oblivious transfer between two untrusting parties is an important primitive in cryptography. There are different variants of oblivious transfer. In Rabin oblivious transfer, the sender Alice holds a bit, and the receiver Bob either obtains the bit, or obtains no information with probability p ? . Alice should not know whether or not Bob obtained the bit. We examine a quantum Rabin oblivious transfer (OT) protocol that uses two pure states. Investigating different cheating scenarios for the sender and for the receiver, we determine optimal cheating probabilities in each case. Comparing the quantum Rabin oblivious transfer protocol to classical Rabin oblivious transfer protocols, we show that the quantum protocol outperforms classical protocols, which do not use a third party, for some values of p ? . We find that quantum Rabin OT protocols that use mixed states can outperform quantum Rabin OT protocols that use pure states for some values of p ? . Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Oblivious transfer is an important primitive in modern cryptography.Applications include secure multiparty computation, oblivious sampling, e-voting, and signatures.Information-theoretically secure perfect 1-out-of 2 oblivious transfer is impossible to achieve.Imperfect variants, where both participants' ability to cheat is still limited, are possible using quantum means while remaining classically impossible.Precisely what security parameters are attainable remains unknown.We introduce a theoretical framework for studying semirandom quantum oblivious transfer, which is shown to be equivalent to regular oblivious transfer in terms of cheating probabilities.We then use it to derive bounds on cheating.We also present a protocol with lower cheating probabilities than previous schemes, together with its optical realization.We show that a lower bound of 2 3 on the minimum achievable cheating probability can be directly derived for semirandom protocols using a different method and definition of cheating than used previously.The lower bound increases from 23 to approximately 0.749 if the states output by the protocol are pure and symmetric.The oblivious transfer scheme we present uses unambiguous state elimination measurements and can be implemented with the same technological requirements as standard quantum cryptography.In particular, it does not require honest participants to prepare or measure entangled states.The cheating probabilities are 3 4 and approximately 0.729 for sender and receiver, respectively, which is lower than in existing protocols.Using a photonic testbed, we have implemented the protocol with honest parties, as well as optimal cheating strategies.Because of the asymmetry of the receiver's and sender's cheating probabilities, the protocol can be combined with a "trivial" protocol to achieve an overall protocol with lower average cheating probabilities of approximately 0.74 for both sender and receiver.This demonstrates that, interestingly, protocols where the final output states are pure and symmetric are not optimal in terms of average cheating probability.
Oblivious transfer, a central functionality in modern cryptography, allows a party to send two one-bit messages to another who can choose one of them to read, remaining ignorant about the other, whereas the sender does not learn the receiver's choice. Oblivious transfer the security of which is information-theoretic for both parties is known impossible to achieve from scratch. The joint behavior of certain bi-partite quantum states is non-local, i.e., cannot be explained by shared classical information. In order to better understand such behavior, which is classically explainable only by communication, but does not allow for it, Popescu and Rohrlich have described a "non-locality machine": Two parties both input a bit, and both get a random output bit the XOR of which is the AND of the input bits. We show a close connection, in a cryptographic sense, between OT and the "PR primitive." More specifically, unconditional OT can be achieved from a single realization of PR, and vice versa. Our reductions, which are single-copy, information-theoretic, and perfect, also lead to a simple and optimal protocol allowing for inverting the direction of OT
Oblivious transfer is a cryptographic primitive where Alice has two bits and Bob wishes to learn some function of them. Ideally, Alice should not learn Bob's desired function choice and Bob should not learn any more than what is logically implied by the function value. While decent quantum protocols for this task are known, many become completely insecure if an adversary were to control the quantum devices used in the implementation of the protocol. In this work we give a fully device-independent quantum protocol for XOR oblivious transfer.
Oblivious transfer (OT) is an important tool in cryptography. It serves as a subroutine to other complex procedures of both theoretical and practical significance. A common attribute of OT protocols is that one party (Alice) has to send a message to another party (Bob) and has to stay oblivious to whether Bob did receive the message. Specific (OT) protocols vary by exact definition of the task---in the all-or-nothing protocol, Alice sends a single bit-string message, which Bob is able to read with only 5050%50 probability, whereas in a 1-out-of-2 OT protocol Bob reads one out of two messages sent by Alice. These two flavors of protocol are known to be equivalent. Recently, a computationally secure all-or-nothing OT protocol based on quantum states was developed by A. Souto et al. [Phys. Rev. A 91, 042306 (2015)], which, however, cannot be reduced to a 1-out-of-2 OT protocol by standard means. Here we present an elaborate reduction of this protocol that retains the security of the original.