Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a primitive of asymmetrically distributing information between users, proposed to build Secure Computations. In this letter, we propose an informationtheoretical variant of OT that requires weak assumptions and can be therefore more easily implemented with transmission media. We show then that One-out-of-two Oblivious Transfer (O-OT), the central version of OT, can be reduced to this Weak OT (WOT) with arbitrary small loss of security, i.e. secure O-OT can be realised from our WOT.
Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a primitive of asymmetrically distributing information between users, proposed to build Secure Computations. In this letter, we propose an informationtheoretical variant of OT that requires weak assumptions and can be therefore more easily implemented with transmission media. We show then that One-out-of-two Oblivious Transfer (O-OT), the central version of OT, can be reduced to this Weak OT (WOT) with arbitrary small loss of security, i.e. secure O-OT can be realised from our WOT.
Oblivious transfer is a primitive of paramount importance in cryptography or, more precisely, two- and multi-party computation due to its universality. Unfortunately, oblivious transfer cannot be achieved in an unconditionally secure way for both parties from scratch. Therefore, it is a natural question what information-theoretic primitives or computational assumptions oblivious transfer can be based on. The results in our thesis are threefold. First, we present a protocol that implements oblivious transfer from a weakened oblivious transfer called universal oblivious transfer, where one of the two players may get additional information. Our reduction is about twice as efficient as previous results. Weak oblivious transfer is an even weaker form of oblivious transfer, where both players may obtain additional information about the other player's input, and where the output can contain errors. We give a new, weaker definition of weak oblivious transfer, as well as new reductions with a more detailed analysis. Finally, we carry over our results to the computational setting and show how a weak oblivious transfer that is sometimes incorrect and only mildly secure against computationally bounded adversaries can be strengthened.
Oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is an essential tool in cryptography that provides a wide range of applications such as secure multi-party computation, private information retrieval, private set intersection, contract signing, and privacy-preserving location-based services. The OT protocol has different variants such as one-out-of-2, one-out-of- n , k -out-of- n , and OT extension. In the OT (one-out-of-2, one-out-of- n , and OT extension) protocol, the sender has a set of messages, whereas the receiver has a key. The receiver sends that key to the sender in a secure way; the sender cannot get any information about the received key. The sender encrypts every message by operating on every message using the received key and sends all the encrypted messages to the receiver. The receiver is able to extract only the required message using his key. However, in the k -out-of- n OT protocol, the receiver sends a set of k keys to the sender, and in replay, the sender sends all the encrypted messages. The receiver uses his keys and extracts the required messages, but it cannot gain any information about the messages that it has not requested. Generally, the OT protocol requires high communication and computation cost if we transfer millions of oblivious messages. The OT extension protocol provides a solution for this, where the receiver transfers a set of keys to the sender by executing a few numbers of OT protocols. Then, the sender encrypts all the messages using cheap symmetric key cryptography with the help of a received set of keys and transfers millions of oblivious messages to the receiver. In this work, we present different variants of OT protocols such as one-out-of-2, one-out-of- n , k -out-of- n , and OT extension. Furthermore, we cover various aspects of theoretical security guarantees such as semi-honest and malicious adversaries, universally composable, used techniques, computation, and communication efficiency aspects. From the analysis, we found that the semi-honest adversary-based OT protocols required low communication and computation costs as compared to malicious adversary-based OT protocols.
Oblivious transfer (OT) is one of the most fundamental primitives in cryptography and is widely used in protocols for secure two-party and multi-party computation. As secure com-putation becomes more practical, the need for practical large scale oblivious transfer protocols is becoming more evident. Oblivious transfer extensions are protocols that enable a relatively small number of “base-OTs ” to be utilized to compute a very large number of OTs at low cost. In the semi-honest setting, Ishai et al. (CRYPTO 2003) presented an OT extension protocol for which the cost of each OT (beyond the base-OTs) is just a few hash function operations. In the malicious setting, Nielsen et al. (CRYPTO 2012) presented an efficient OT extension protocol for the setting of active adversaries, that is secure in the random oracle model. In this work, we present an OT extension protocol for the setting of malicious adversaries that is more efficient and uses less communication than previous works. In addition, our protocol can be proven secure in both the random oracle model, and in the standard model with a type of correlation robustness. Given the importance of OT in many secure computation protocols, increasing the efficiency of OT extensions is another important step forward to making secure
Abstract Oblivious Transfer ( OT OT ) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that becomes a crucial component of a practical secure protocol. OT OT is typically implemented in software, and one way to accelerate its running time is by using hardware implementations. However, such implementations are vulnerable to side-channel attacks (SCAs). On the other hand, protecting interactive protocols against SCA is highly challenging due to their longer secrets (which include inputs and randomness), more complex design, and the need to run multiple instances. Consequently, there are no truly practical leakage-resistant OT OT protocols yet. In this paper, we introduce two tailored indistinguishability-based security definitions for leakage-resilient OT OT , focusing on protecting the sender’s state. Second, we propose a practical semi-honest secure OT OT protocol that achieves these security levels while minimizing the assumptions on the protocol’s building blocks and the use of a secret state.
We consider the problem of basing Oblivious Transfer (OT) and Bit Commitment (BC), with information theoretic security, on seemingly weaker primitives.We introduce a general model for describing such primitives, called Weak Generic Transfer (WGT). This model includes as important special cases Weak Oblivious Transfer (WOT), where both the sender and receiver may learn too much about the other party's input, and a new, more realistic model of noisy channels, called unfair noisy channels. An unfair noisy channel has a known range of possible noise levels; protocols must work for any level within this range against adversaries who know the actual noise level. We give a precise characterization for when one can base OT on WOT. When the deviation of the WOT from the ideal is above a certain threshold, we show that no information-theoretic reductions from OT (even against passive adversaries) and BC exist; when the deviation is below this threshold, we give a reduction from OT (and hence BC) that is information-theoretically secure against active adversaries. For unfair noisy channels we show a similar threshold phenomenon for bit commitment. If the upper bound on the noise is above a threshold (given as function of the lower bound) then no information-theoretic reduction from OT (even against passive adversaries) or BC exist; when it is below this threshold we give a reduction from BC. As a partial result, we give a reduction from OT to UNC for smaller noise intervals.
Abstract Oblivious transfer (OT) is one of the cornerstones of secure multiparty computation. It is clear that unconditionally secure OT is impossible. Any protocol for OT requires computational assumptions, such as number‐theoretic cryptographic assumptions or the assumptions of existence of one‐way functions. On the other hand, it is broadly believed that one‐way functions alone do not promise secure OT. However, in this paper, a novel computationally secure quantum oblivious transfer (QOT) protocol is proposed with the help of quantum channels under the minimum assumption requirements: the existence of one‐way functions.