Oblivious transfer is the cryptographic primitive where Alice sends one of two bits to Bob but is oblivious to the bit received. Using quantum communication, we can build oblivious transfer protoco...
We propose a quantum protocol for 1-out-of-2, 1-out-of-n and k-out-of-n oblivious transfer. Oblivious transfer is a counter-intuitive cryptographic primitive in which the receiver receives only the information he is authorized for, while the sender does not know what information receiver received. In 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer, Alice sends two bits to Bob who can choose only one of them to read, while Alice does not know which bit Bob read. k-out-of-n oblivious transfer is an extension of this idea. The proposed protocols do not require any classical communication, are practical, secure and can be implemented using current technology.
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 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 (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 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.