Cloud computing is a promising paradigm to provide flexible and reliable services. Nevertheless, concern and anxiety about data security and tenants’ privacy are still a major barrier for the popularity of cloud computing. Oblivious transfer (OT) is a cryptographic primitive that enables a client to selectively retrieve data in a privacy-preserving manner. It can be used to construct high-level protocols enabling applications in the cloud-computing paradigm. Technically, it has been proven that OT protocols can be constructed using a CPA-secure public-key encryption scheme. Along these lines, Peikert et al. formulated a dual-mode cryptosystem on which they constructed a single-bit OT scheme. Obviously, it has deficiencies in performance, which makes it unqualified for use in cloud-computing scenarios. This paper aims at providing an efficient multi-bit OT scheme for secure cloud applications. We first propose a multi-bit dual-mode cryptosystem based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem. Based on this multi-bit dual-mode cryptosystem, we construct a multi-bit OT. We present details of the OT construction together with security analysis of our scheme, and finally provide an example of how it can be used in specific application scenarios.
Cloud computing is a promising paradigm to provide flexible and reliable services. Nevertheless, concern and anxiety about data security and tenants’ privacy are still a major barrier for the popularity of cloud computing. Oblivious transfer (OT) is a cryptographic primitive that enables a client to selectively retrieve data in a privacy-preserving manner. It can be used to construct high-level protocols enabling applications in the cloud-computing paradigm. Technically, it has been proven that OT protocols can be constructed using a CPA-secure public-key encryption scheme. Along these lines, Peikert et al. formulated a dual-mode cryptosystem on which they constructed a single-bit OT scheme. Obviously, it has deficiencies in performance, which makes it unqualified for use in cloud-computing scenarios. This paper aims at providing an efficient multi-bit OT scheme for secure cloud applications. We first propose a multi-bit dual-mode cryptosystem based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem. Based on this multi-bit dual-mode cryptosystem, we construct a multi-bit OT. We present details of the OT construction together with security analysis of our scheme, and finally provide an example of how it can be used in specific application scenarios.
The existing lattice-based cut-and-choose oblivious transfer protocol is constructed based on the learning-with-errors (LWE) problem, which generally has the problem of inefficiency. An efficient cut-and-choose oblivious transfer protocol is proposed based on the difficult module-learning-with-errors (MLWE) problem. Compression and decompression techniques are introduced in the LWE-based dual-mode encryption system to improve it to an MLWE-based dual-mode encryption framework, which is applied to the protocol as an intermediate scheme. Subsequently, the security and efficiency of the protocol are analysed, and the security of the protocol can be reduced to the shortest independent vector problem (SIVP) on the lattice, which is resistant to quantum attacks. Since the whole protocol relies on the polynomial ring of elements to perform operations, the efficiency of polynomial modulo multiplication can be improved by using fast Fourier transform (FFT). Finally, this paper compares the protocol with an LWE-based protocol in terms of computational and communication complexities. The analysis results show that the protocol reduces the computation and communication overheads by at least a factor of n while maintaining the optimal number of communication rounds under malicious adversary attacks.
Abstract. The most efficient previously proposed oblivious transfer schemes require t calls of 1-out-n oblivious transfer (OT) to construct the t-out-n OT. Its computational requirements and bandwidth consumption are quite demanding. Therefore, to guarantee the quality of growing popular communication service, an efficient t-out-n OT scheme with low bandwidth is urgently desired. Based on elliptic curve cryptosystems, we propose a new t-out-n OT scheme in this paper. Compared with existing OT schemes based on modular exponentiations, our scheme can reduce many computation and communication loads for both the sender and the receiver. Owing to its smaller bandwidth and faster computation speed, our scheme is very suitable for mobile clients and smart-card users. Moreover, our scheme provides a simple algorithm and fewer parameter requirements. Keywords: Two-lock cryptosystem, private information retrieval, elliptic curve 1.
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 a fundamental cryptographic primitive enabling privacy-preserving computation and constitutes a core building block for secure multi-party computation while supporting a wide range of security-sensitive applications: private information retrieval, zero-knowledge proofs, and password-authenticated key exchange, to cite a few. While recent advances in OT extension have significantly reduced amortised costs, their reliance on batches of random base OTs and substantial pre-computation phases limits their practicality in scenarios where the number of transfers is modest or where communication latency and client-side computation are critical constraints. In such settings, efficient base OT protocols remain both relevant and necessary. In this work, we introduce I-(OT)2, a novel base 1-out-of-2 OT protocol grounded in the quadratic residuosity problem, specifically designed to minimise receiver-side computation and interaction. Our construction is particularly appealing on client--server architectures in which the receiver operates on low-power hardware, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Through a lightweight offline pre-computation phase, I-(OT)2 shifts the on-transfer computational burden almost entirely to the Sender, while reducing online communication to only six messages and four digests exchanged. We provide a detailed description of the protocol, accompanied by a formal proof of its security. Moreover, to demonstrate the viability of I-(OT)2, we also present an open-source proof-of-concept implementation (in C language) evaluated on real IoT hardware. Results are staggering: for 128-bit security using a 3072-bit RSA modulus, the receiver incurs an average online cost per OT as low as 2.80 μs on desktop platforms and 39.90 μs on IoT devices, more than 10× faster than the well known SimplestOT.
Universal composability (UC) is a primary security flavor for designing oblivious transfer (OT) due to its advantage of arbitrary composition. However, the study of UC‐secure OT over lattices is still far behind compared with constructions over prequantum assumptions. Relying on the learning with errors (LWE) assumption, Quach proposes a dual‐mode encryption scheme (SCN’20) for deriving a two‐round OT whose security is provably UC‐secure in the common reference string (CRS) model. Due to its use of a randomized rounding function proposed by Benhamouda et al. (PKC’18), this OT can only be limited to transmitting single‐bit messages. Therefore, conducting trivial repetitions of Quach’s OT when transmitting multibit strings would be very costly. In this work, we put forward a modified dual‐mode encryption cryptosystem under the decisional LWE assumption, from which we can derive a UC‐secure string OT with both full‐fledged dual‐mode security and better efficiency on transmitting strings. The key technique we adopt is a key reconciliation scheme proposed by Jiang et al. (PKC’20), which is utilized to extend the single‐bit symmetric encryption key (produced by the aforementioned rounding function) to a multibit case. Through a comprehensive performance analysis, we demonstrate that our proposal can indeed strike a balance between security and efficiency.
Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic protocol that finds a number of applications, in particular, as an essential building block for two-party and multi-party computation. We construct a round-optimal (2 rounds) universally composable (UC) protocol for oblivious transfer secure against active adaptive adversaries from any OW-CPA secure public-key encryption scheme with certain properties in the random oracle model (ROM). In terms of computation, our protocol only requires the generation of a public/secret-key pair, two encryption operations and one decryption operation, apart from a few calls to the random oracle. In~terms of communication, our protocol only requires the transfer of one public-key, two ciphertexts, and three binary strings of roughly the same size as the message. Next, we show how to instantiate our construction under the low noise LPN, McEliece, QC-MDPC, LWE, and CDH assumptions. Our instantiations based on the low noise LPN, McEliece, and QC-MDPC assumptions are the first UC-secure OT protocols based on coding assumptions to achieve: 1) adaptive security, 2) optimal round complexity, 3) low communication and computational complexities. Previous results in this setting only achieved static security and used costly cut-and-choose techniques.Our instantiation based on CDH achieves adaptive security at the small cost of communicating only two more group elements as compared to the gap-DH based Simplest OT protocol of Chou and Orlandi (Latincrypt 15), which only achieves static security in the ROM.