Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Secure Two-Party Computation via Cut-and-Choose Oblivious Transfer.

Yehuda Lindell, Benny Pinkas B

Published Jan 1, 2010• 3 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Protocols for secure two-party computation enable a pair of parties to compute a function of their inputs while preserving security properties such as privacy, correctness and independence of inputs. Recently, a number of protocols have been proposed for the efficient construction of two-party computation secure in the presence of malicious adversaries (where security is proven under the standard simulation-based ideal/real model paradigm for defining security). In this paper, we present a protocol for this task that follows the methodology of using cut-and-choose to boost Yao’s protocol to be secure in the presence of malicious adversaries. Relying on specific assumptions (DDH), we construct a protocol that is significantly more efficient and far simpler than the protocol of Lindell and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2007) that follows the same methodology. We provide an exact, concrete analysis of the efficiency of our scheme and demonstrate that (at least for not very small circuits) our protocol is more efficient than any other known today. secure two-party computation, malicious adversaries, cut-and-choose, concrete effi-Keywords: ciency An extended abstract of this work appeared at TCC 2011.

Related papers

An Efficient Protocol for Secure Two-Party Computation in the Presence of Malicious Adversaries.

Yehuda Lindell, Benny Pinkas B

Abstract. We show an efficient secure two-party protocol, based on Yao’s construction, which provides security against malicious adversaries. Yao’s original protocol is only secure in the presence of semi-honest adversaries. Security against malicious adversaries can be obtained by applying the compiler of Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson (the “GMW compiler”). However, this approach does not seem to be very practical as it requires using generic zero-knowledge proofs. Our construction is based on applying cut-and-choose techniques to the original circuit and inputs. Security is proved according to the ideal/real simulation paradigm, and the proof is in the standard model (with no random oracle model or common reference string assumptions). The resulting protocol is computationally efficient: the only usage of asymmetric cryptography is for running O(1) oblivious transfers for each input bit (or for each bit of a statistical security parameter, whichever is larger). Our protocol combines techniques from folklore (like cut-and-choose) along with new techniques for efficiently proving consistency of inputs. We remark that a naive implementation of the cut-and-choose technique with Yao’s protocol does not yield a secure protocol. This is the first paper to show how to properly implement these techniques, and to provide a full proof of security. Our protocol can also be interpreted as a constant-round black-box reduction of secure two-party com-putation to oblivious transfer and perfectly-hiding commitments, or a black-box reduction of secure two-party computation to oblivious transfer alone, with a number of rounds which is linear in a sta-tistical security parameter. These two reductions are comparable to Kilian’s reduction, which uses OT alone but incurs a number of rounds which is linear in the depth of the circuit [18]. 1

•Jan 1, 2008•0 citations

Fast Two-Party Secure Computation with Minimal Assumptions.

Abhi A. Shelat, Chih-Hao Shen

Abstract. All recent implementations of two-party secure computation protocols require specific complexity assumptions for their correctness and/or efficiency (e.g., DDH, homomorphic encryption, Sigma protocols for specific languages). We propose and implement a Yao-based protocol for secure two-party computation against malicious adversaries that enjoys the following benefits: 1. it assumes the minimal hardness assumption, that is, oblivious transfers; 2. it has constant round complexity; 3. its overhead is linear times (in terms of security parameter) of the Yao protocol’s, which is the best one could hope for by using the circuit-level cut-and-choose technique to achieve malicious security; and 4. it is embarrassingly parallelizable in that its depth complexity is roughly the same as the Yao protocol. To achieve these properties, we use the cut-and-choose paradigm, but solve the main three problems for achieving malicious security (input consistency, selective failure, and output authentication) in a novel and efficient manner. In particular, we propose an efficient witness-indistinguishable proof for output authentication; we suggest the use of an auxiliary 2-universal circuit to ensure the generator’s input consistency; and we advance the performance of the state-of-the-art approach defending the selective failure attack. Not only does our protocol require weaker complexity assumptions, but our implementation of this protocol also demonstrates a several factor improvement over the best prior two-party secure computation protocol which rely on specific number theoretic assumptions.

•Jan 1, 2013•0 citations

Fast Cut-and-Choose Based Protocols for Malicious and Covert Adversaries.

Yehuda Lindell

In the setting of secure two-party computation, two parties wish to securely compute a joint function of their private inputs, while revealing only the output. One of the primary techniques for achieving efficient secure two-party computation is that of Yao’s garbled circuits (FOCS 1986). In the semi-honest model, where just one garbled circuit is constructed and evaluated, Yao’s protocol has proven itself to be very efficient. However, a malicious adversary who constructs the garbled circuit may construct a garbling of a different circuit computing a different function, and this cannot be detected (due to the garbling). In order to solve this problem, many circuits are sent and some of them are opened to check that they are correct while the others are evaluated. This methodology, called cut-and-choose, introduces significant overhead, both in computation and in communication, and is mainly due to the number of circuits that must be used in order to prevent cheating. In this paper, we present a cut-and-choose protocol for secure computation based on garbled circuits, with security in the presence of malicious adversaries, that vastly improves on all previous protocols of this type. Concretely, for a cheating probability of at most 2−40, the best previous works send between 125 and 128 circuits. In contrast, in our protocol 40 circuits alone suffice (with some additional overhead). Asymptotically, we achieve a cheating probability of 2−s where s is the number of garbled circuits, in contrast to the previous best of 2−0.32s. We achieve this by introducing a new cut-and-choose methodology with the property that in order to cheat, all of the evaluated circuits must be incorrect, and not just the majority as in previous works. The security of our protocol relies on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption.

•Jan 1, 2013•0 citations

Cut-and-Choose Bilateral Oblivious Transfer and Its Application

Chuan Zhao, Han Jiang, Xiaochao Wei +2 more

Oblivious transfer is a fundamental tool in cryptographic protocols, especially in secure two-party computation. In TCC 2011, Lindell and Pinkas proposed a variant called cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, which did a great job in solving the selective failure attack in secure two-party computation protocols based on cut-and-choose paradigm. In this paper, we present a new primitive called cut-and-choose bilateral oblivious transfer. As an extension to cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, in addition to overcoming the selective failure attack, this primitive also makes a contribution to reducing the round number of the protocols that invoke it. This is very important in the scenarios where interactions between parties are limited. Besides, the application of this primitive in the outer protocols enables us to present a more modular and clean high-level description of the protocol framework. Furthermore, we believe that the new primitive is of independent research interest itself and could be useful in many cut-and-choose scenarios. Based on homomorphic encryption, we construct an efficient instantiation of this primitive in malicious model, and present a formal rigorous proof of its security under ideal/real simulation paradigm.

•Aug 20, 2015•5 citations

Cut-and-Choose Bilateral Oblivious Transfer and Its Application

Chuan Zhao, Han Jiang, Xiaochao Wei +2 more

Oblivious transfer is a fundamental tool in cryptographic protocols, especially in secure two-party computation. In TCC 2011, Lindell and Pinkas proposed a variant called cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, which did a great job in solving the selective failure attack in secure two-party computation protocols based on cut-and-choose paradigm. In this paper, we present a new primitive called cut-and-choose bilateral oblivious transfer. As an extension to cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, in addition to overcoming the selective failure attack, this primitive also makes a contribution to reducing the round number of the protocols that invoke it. This is very important in the scenarios where interactions between parties are limited. Besides, the application of this primitive in the outer protocols enables us to present a more modular and clean high-level description of the protocol framework. Furthermore, we believe that the new primitive is of independent research interest itself and could be useful in many cut-and-choose scenarios. Based on homomorphic encryption, we construct an efficient instantiation of this primitive in malicious model, and present a formal rigorous proof of its security under ideal/real simulation paradigm.

IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)•Aug 1, 2015•10 citations

Efficient Secure Two-Party Computation Against Malicious Adversaries

Chih-Hao Shen

Secure 2PC (Two-Party Computation) is a research problem that abstracts a wide class of realworld applications with privacy concerns.In this problem, two parties want to collaboratively compute an objective function over their private inputs while the inputs are too valuable or sensitive to share with each other.For example, competing insurance companies may be interested in finding out the statistics of their aggregated client database but reluctant to reveal their own databases; drivers on the road may want to query the nearest gas station but hesitate to disclose their GPS coordinates.In this thesis, we constructed a framework for secure 2PC.This framework consists of a two-party interactive protocol and a few cryptographic building blocks.More specifically, the former comes from applying the cut-and-choose technique to the Yao protocol with the support of the latter, which are formally defined to capture the security properties needed in order to tackle the known attacks.We first proved that the main protocol indeed securely computes any single-output objective function even in the presence of malicious adversaries.Next, to demonstrate the power of this framework, we explicitly instantiated the building blocks by using number-theoretic assumptions and the technique of auxiliary circuits.We also presented techniques that allow our framework to handle from any single-output to any two-output objective functions.Finally, we implemented the framework to demonstrate its performance empirically.In particular, this implementation benefits from the embarrassingly parallelizable nature of our framework.

•Jul 30, 2013•0 citations
Protocols for secure two-party computation enable a pair of parties to compute a function of their inputs while preserving security properties such as privacy, correctness and independence of inputs. Recently, a number of protocols have been proposed for the efficient construction of two-party computation secure in the presence of malicious adversaries (where security is proven under the standard simulation-based ideal/real model paradigm for defining security). In this paper, we present a protocol for this task that follows the methodology of using cut-and-choose to boost Yao’s protocol to be secure in the presence of malicious adversaries. Relying on specific assumptions (DDH), we construct a protocol that is significantly more efficient and far simpler than the protocol of Lindell and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2007) that follows the same methodology. We provide an exact, concrete analysis of the efficiency of our scheme and demonstrate that (at least for not very small circuits) our protocol is more efficient than any other known today. secure two-party computation, malicious adversaries, cut-and-choose, concrete effi-Keywords: ciency An extended abstract of this work appeared at TCC 2011.
Abstract. We show an efficient secure two-party protocol, based on Yao’s construction, which provides security against malicious adversaries. Yao’s original protocol is only secure in the presence of semi-honest adversaries. Security against malicious adversaries can be obtained by applying the compiler of Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson (the “GMW compiler”). However, this approach does not seem to be very practical as it requires using generic zero-knowledge proofs. Our construction is based on applying cut-and-choose techniques to the original circuit and inputs. Security is proved according to the ideal/real simulation paradigm, and the proof is in the standard model (with no random oracle model or common reference string assumptions). The resulting protocol is computationally efficient: the only usage of asymmetric cryptography is for running O(1) oblivious transfers for each input bit (or for each bit of a statistical security parameter, whichever is larger). Our protocol combines techniques from folklore (like cut-and-choose) along with new techniques for efficiently proving consistency of inputs. We remark that a naive implementation of the cut-and-choose technique with Yao’s protocol does not yield a secure protocol. This is the first paper to show how to properly implement these techniques, and to provide a full proof of security. Our protocol can also be interpreted as a constant-round black-box reduction of secure two-party com-putation to oblivious transfer and perfectly-hiding commitments, or a black-box reduction of secure two-party computation to oblivious transfer alone, with a number of rounds which is linear in a sta-tistical security parameter. These two reductions are comparable to Kilian’s reduction, which uses OT alone but incurs a number of rounds which is linear in the depth of the circuit [18]. 1
Abstract. All recent implementations of two-party secure computation protocols require specific complexity assumptions for their correctness and/or efficiency (e.g., DDH, homomorphic encryption, Sigma protocols for specific languages). We propose and implement a Yao-based protocol for secure two-party computation against malicious adversaries that enjoys the following benefits: 1. it assumes the minimal hardness assumption, that is, oblivious transfers; 2. it has constant round complexity; 3. its overhead is linear times (in terms of security parameter) of the Yao protocol’s, which is the best one could hope for by using the circuit-level cut-and-choose technique to achieve malicious security; and 4. it is embarrassingly parallelizable in that its depth complexity is roughly the same as the Yao protocol. To achieve these properties, we use the cut-and-choose paradigm, but solve the main three problems for achieving malicious security (input consistency, selective failure, and output authentication) in a novel and efficient manner. In particular, we propose an efficient witness-indistinguishable proof for output authentication; we suggest the use of an auxiliary 2-universal circuit to ensure the generator’s input consistency; and we advance the performance of the state-of-the-art approach defending the selective failure attack. Not only does our protocol require weaker complexity assumptions, but our implementation of this protocol also demonstrates a several factor improvement over the best prior two-party secure computation protocol which rely on specific number theoretic assumptions.
In the setting of secure two-party computation, two parties wish to securely compute a joint function of their private inputs, while revealing only the output. One of the primary techniques for achieving efficient secure two-party computation is that of Yao’s garbled circuits (FOCS 1986). In the semi-honest model, where just one garbled circuit is constructed and evaluated, Yao’s protocol has proven itself to be very efficient. However, a malicious adversary who constructs the garbled circuit may construct a garbling of a different circuit computing a different function, and this cannot be detected (due to the garbling). In order to solve this problem, many circuits are sent and some of them are opened to check that they are correct while the others are evaluated. This methodology, called cut-and-choose, introduces significant overhead, both in computation and in communication, and is mainly due to the number of circuits that must be used in order to prevent cheating. In this paper, we present a cut-and-choose protocol for secure computation based on garbled circuits, with security in the presence of malicious adversaries, that vastly improves on all previous protocols of this type. Concretely, for a cheating probability of at most 2−40, the best previous works send between 125 and 128 circuits. In contrast, in our protocol 40 circuits alone suffice (with some additional overhead). Asymptotically, we achieve a cheating probability of 2−s where s is the number of garbled circuits, in contrast to the previous best of 2−0.32s. We achieve this by introducing a new cut-and-choose methodology with the property that in order to cheat, all of the evaluated circuits must be incorrect, and not just the majority as in previous works. The security of our protocol relies on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption.
Oblivious transfer is a fundamental tool in cryptographic protocols, especially in secure two-party computation. In TCC 2011, Lindell and Pinkas proposed a variant called cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, which did a great job in solving the selective failure attack in secure two-party computation protocols based on cut-and-choose paradigm. In this paper, we present a new primitive called cut-and-choose bilateral oblivious transfer. As an extension to cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, in addition to overcoming the selective failure attack, this primitive also makes a contribution to reducing the round number of the protocols that invoke it. This is very important in the scenarios where interactions between parties are limited. Besides, the application of this primitive in the outer protocols enables us to present a more modular and clean high-level description of the protocol framework. Furthermore, we believe that the new primitive is of independent research interest itself and could be useful in many cut-and-choose scenarios. Based on homomorphic encryption, we construct an efficient instantiation of this primitive in malicious model, and present a formal rigorous proof of its security under ideal/real simulation paradigm.
Oblivious transfer is a fundamental tool in cryptographic protocols, especially in secure two-party computation. In TCC 2011, Lindell and Pinkas proposed a variant called cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, which did a great job in solving the selective failure attack in secure two-party computation protocols based on cut-and-choose paradigm. In this paper, we present a new primitive called cut-and-choose bilateral oblivious transfer. As an extension to cut-and-choose oblivious transfer, in addition to overcoming the selective failure attack, this primitive also makes a contribution to reducing the round number of the protocols that invoke it. This is very important in the scenarios where interactions between parties are limited. Besides, the application of this primitive in the outer protocols enables us to present a more modular and clean high-level description of the protocol framework. Furthermore, we believe that the new primitive is of independent research interest itself and could be useful in many cut-and-choose scenarios. Based on homomorphic encryption, we construct an efficient instantiation of this primitive in malicious model, and present a formal rigorous proof of its security under ideal/real simulation paradigm.
Secure 2PC (Two-Party Computation) is a research problem that abstracts a wide class of realworld applications with privacy concerns.In this problem, two parties want to collaboratively compute an objective function over their private inputs while the inputs are too valuable or sensitive to share with each other.For example, competing insurance companies may be interested in finding out the statistics of their aggregated client database but reluctant to reveal their own databases; drivers on the road may want to query the nearest gas station but hesitate to disclose their GPS coordinates.In this thesis, we constructed a framework for secure 2PC.This framework consists of a two-party interactive protocol and a few cryptographic building blocks.More specifically, the former comes from applying the cut-and-choose technique to the Yao protocol with the support of the latter, which are formally defined to capture the security properties needed in order to tackle the known attacks.We first proved that the main protocol indeed securely computes any single-output objective function even in the presence of malicious adversaries.Next, to demonstrate the power of this framework, we explicitly instantiated the building blocks by using number-theoretic assumptions and the technique of auxiliary circuits.We also presented techniques that allow our framework to handle from any single-output to any two-output objective functions.Finally, we implemented the framework to demonstrate its performance empirically.In particular, this implementation benefits from the embarrassingly parallelizable nature of our framework.