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arXiv:2405.04486 · Physical Review Research

Quantum Rabin oblivious transfer using two pure states

Lara Stroh, James T. Peat, Mats Kroneberg, Ittoop Vergheese Puthoor, Erika Andersson

Published Oct 2, 2024• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.6.043004

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•Sep 14, 2026•0 citations
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 (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that is useful for realizing any two-party computation. Since information-theoretically secure perfect OT is impossible classically and quantumly, research has focused on imperfect protocols, exploring how close to perfect one can get against unbounded dishonest parties. While current approaches often make use of pure quantum states, recent work suggests that mixed quantum states may improve performance. In this paper, we investigate the use of mixed quantum states in Rabin oblivious transfer, where a sender holds one bit and a receiver learns its value with a certain probability while the sender remains ignorant of whether the receiver learned it. We present three mixed-state protocols constructed with two distinct methods, extending an existing pure-state scheme and employing a probabilistic approach, and demonstrate improved performance compared to classical and quantum pure-state protocols across varying parameters.
Oblivious transfer has been the interest of study as it can be used as a building block for multiparty computation. There are many forms of oblivious transfer; we explore a variant known as Rabin oblivious transfer. Here the sender Alice has one bit, and the receiver Bob obtains this bit with a certain probability. The sender does not know whether the receiver obtained the bit or not. For a previously suggested protocol, we show a possible attack using a delayed measurement. This allows a cheating party to pass tests carried out by the other party, while gaining more information than if they would have been honest. We show how this attack allows perfect cheating, unless the protocol is modified, and suggest changes which lower the cheating probability for the examined cheating strategies.
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.
Rabin oblivious transfer is the cryptographic task where Alice wishes to receive a bit from Bob but it may get lost with probability 1/2. In this work, we provide protocol designs which yield quantum protocols with improved security. Moreover, we provide a constant lower bound on any quantum protocol for Rabin oblivious transfer. To quantify the security of this task with asymmetric cheating definitions, we introduce the notion of cheating advantage which may be of independent interest in the study of other asymmetric cryptographic primitives.
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.
Abstract We investigate coherent-state implementations of quantum Rabin oblivious transfer (OT) based on unambiguous state discrimination and derive the optimal cheating strategies of a dishonest receiver Bob and sender Alice as functions of the coherent-state amplitude. For Bob, we compare the operational guessing probability with the Helstrom minimum-error bound and identify the parameter regimewhere a genuine quantum advantage arises. For Alice, we analyze optimal cheating under three verification strategies employed by Bob, no testing, statistical monitoring, and full interactive testing, and show that the strongest verification requires entangled probe states. Cheating bounds are obtained for both discrete-variable (DV) and continuous-variable (CV) ancilla encodings, including the case where Alice also attempts to infer Bob’s received bit. We further construct a quantum-optical implementation of the semi classical probabilistic Rabin OT protocol (SC-Rabin OT) along with the fully classical Rabin OT (FC-Rabin OT). These are compared with the coherent-state quantum protocol, demonstrating that in the proposed coherent-state based protocol, while Alice’s capacity to cheat remains identical in both the quantum and classical paradigms, it successfully restricts Bob’s cheating probability below classical limits over experimentally relevant parameter ranges. These results establish a measurable quantum advantage for Rabin OT using only coherent states and unambiguous measurements.