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) 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.
Secure two-party computation allows two parties to evaluate a function on their private inputs while keeping all information private except what can be inferred from the outputs. A major building block and the foundation for many efficient secure computation protocols is oblivious transfer (OT). In an OT protocol a sender inputs two messages (x_{0}, x_{1}) while a receiver with choice bit c wants to receive message x_{c}.The OT protocol execution guarantees that the sender learns no information about c and the receiver learns no information about x_{1−c}. This thesis focuses on the efficient generation of OTs and their use in secure computation. In particular, we show how to compute OTs more efficiently, improve generic secure computation protocols which can be used to securely evaluate any functionality, and develop highly efficient special-purpose protocols for private set intersection (PSI). We outline our contributions in more detail next. More Efficient OT Extensions. The most efficient OT protocols are based on public-key cryptography and require a constant number of exponentiations per OT. However, for many practical applications where millions to billions of OTs need to be computed, these exponentiations become prohibitively slow. To enable these applications, OT extension protocols [Bea96, IKNP03] can be used, which extend a small number of public-key-based OTs to an arbitrarily large number using cheap symmetric-key cryptography only. We improve the computation and communication efficiency of OT extension protocols and show how to achieve security against malicious adversaries, which can arbitrarily deviate from the protocol, at low overhead. Our resulting protocols can compute several million of OTs per second and we show that, in contrast to previous belief, the local computation overhead for computing OTs is so low that the main bottleneck is the network bandwidth. Parts of these results are published in: • G. Asharov, Y. Lindell, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. More Efficient Oblivious Transfer and Extensions for Faster Secure Computation. In 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’13). • G. Asharov, Y. Lindell, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. More Efficient Oblivious Transfer Extensions with Security for Malicious Adversaries. In 34th Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT’15. • G. Asharov, Y. Lindell, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. More Efficient Oblivious Transfer Extensions. To appear in Journal of Cryptology. Online at http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/602. Communication-Efficient Generic Secure Two-Party Computation. Generic secure two-party computation techniques allow to evaluate a function, represented as a circuit of linear (XOR) and non-linear (AND) gates. One of the most prominent generic secure two-party computation protocols is Yao’s garbled circuits [Yao86], for which many optimizations have been proposed. Shortly after Yao’s protocol, the generic secure protocol by Goldreich-Micali-Wigderson (GMW) [GMW87] was introduced. The GMW protocol requires a large number of OTs and was believed to be less efficient for secure two-party computation than Yao’s protocol [HL10, CHK+12]. We improve the efficiency of the GMW protocol and show that it can outperform Yao’s garbled circuits protocol in settings with low bandwidth. Furthermore, we utilize the flexibility of OT and outline special-purpose constructions that can be used within the GMW protocol and which improve its efficiency even further. Parts of these results are published in: • T. Schneider, M. Zohner. GMW vs. Yao? Efficient Secure Two-Party Computation with Low Depth Circuits. In 17th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC’13). • D. Demmler, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. ABY - A Framework for Efficient Mixed-Protocol Secure Two-Party Computation. In 22th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’15). • G. Dessouky, F. Koushanfar, A.-R. Sadeghi, T. Schneider, S. Zeitouni, M. Zohner. Pushing the Communication Barrier in Secure Computation using Lookup Tables. In 24th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS’17). Faster Private Set Intersection (PSI). PSI allows two parties to compute the intersection of their private sets without revealing any element that is not in the intersection. PSI is a well-studied problem in secure computation and many special-purpose protocols have been proposed. However, existing PSI protocols are several orders of magnitude slower than an insecure naive hashing solution that is used in practice. In addition, many protocols were compared in a biased fashion, which makes it difficult to identify the most promising solution for a particular scenario. We systematize the progress made on PSI protocols by reviewing, optimizing, and comparing existing PSI protocols. We then introduce a novel PSI protocol that is based on our efficiency improvements in OT extension protocols and which outperforms existing protocols by up to two orders of magnitude. Parts of these results are published in: • B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. Faster Private Set Intersection Based on OT Extension. In 23th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’14). • B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, G. Segev, M. Zohner. Phasing: Private Set Intersection using Permutation-based Hashing. In 24th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security’15). • B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, M. Zohner. Scalable Private Set Intersection Based on OT Extension. Journal paper. In submission. Online at http://iacr.eprint.org/2016/930.
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
Oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is a fundamental building block of cryptography and can be applied widely in many fields. A secure oblivious transfer protocol is supposed to ensure the privacy of both senders and receivers. The privacy of receivers means that the information being selected by receivers would never be revealed to senders. On the other hand, the privacy of senders means that receivers have no further information except for the one that has been selected. In this case, senders are able to deceive receivers by sending same messages. Likewise, in existing 1-out-of-n OT protocols, malicious senders can make all the n messages the same, so that receivers will always get the specific one assigned by senders. This indicates that privacy of receivers wouldnt work under the 1-out-of-n OT protocol. To prevent this kind of attack, this paper provides a general framework on how to design a secure OT protocol based on commutative and ciphertext equality test and take RSA as an example to explain how the protocol is processed.
The Oblivious Transfer (OT) protocol is a privacy-preserving two-way communication protocol important for building secure multiparty computations. To exchange symmetric keys, this protocol is typically based on the Rivest—Shamir—Adleman (RSA) or Diffie—Hellman (DH) cryptographic systems, which are used for encryption during the message-encryption phase. However, in existing OT protocols, the generation of multiple pairs of public and private keys and data computations are time-consuming. Using bijective functions to transform the ciphertext within the same ciphertext domain can ensure indistinguishability after decryption and reduce the computational complexity. In the semi-honest model, a ciphertext obfuscation-based OT protocol framework is proposed and OT protocols are instantiated based on RSA and DH within this framework. Compared with RSA-based encryption schemes, the proposed protocol requires only one pair of public and private keys. When the number of public and private keys is reduced to one, the receiver can use the public key in the digital certificate of the sender to implement the OT protocol using an identity authentication function. Compared with the OT protocol based on the DH key exchange, this protocol has a small data transmission volume and low computational complexity. Experimental results show that, compared with existing OT protocols, the efficiency of instantiated protocols in the key exchange stage can be improved by at least 30%. Moreover, this protocol can be used as a basic protocol for privacy set intersections, obfuscation circuits, and OT extension protocols.
Oblivious transfer is an important cryptographic protocol in various security applications. For example, in on-line transactions, a k-out-of-n oblivious transfer scheme allows a buyer to privately choose k out of n digital goods from a merchant without learning information about other n-k goods. In this paper, we propose several efficient two-round k-out-of-n oblivious transfer schemes, in which the receiver R sends O(k) messages to the sender S, and S sends O(n) messages back to R. The schemes provide unconditional security for either sender or receiver. The computational security for the other side is based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) or Chosen-Target Computational Diffie-Hellman (CT-CDH) problems. Our schemes have the nice property of universal parameters, that is, each pair of R and S need not hold any secret before performing the protocol. The system parameters can be used by all senders and receivers without any trapdoor specification. In some cases, our OTkn schemes are the most efficient ones in terms of the communication cost, either in rounds or the number of messages. Moreover, one of our schemes is extended to an adaptive oblivious transfer scheme. In that scheme, S sends O(n) messages to R in one round in the commitment phase. For each query of R, only O(1) messages are exchanged and O(1) operations are performed. The preliminary version of this paper was published at PKC '05 [Chu and Tzeng 2005].
Oblivious Transfer (OT) is an important cryptographic tool, which has found its usage in many crypto protocols, such as Secure Multiparty Computations [9], Certified E-mail [2] and Simultaneous Contract Signing [20].In this paper, we propose three k-out-of-n OT (OT n k ) protocols based on additive homomorphic encryption.Two of these protocols prohibit malicious behaviors from both sender and receiver.We also achieve efficient communication complexity bounded by O(l • n) in bits, where l is the size of the encryption key.The computational complexity is same or better than the most efficient existing protocols.Due to the semantic security property, the sender cannot get receiver's selection.When the receiver tries to retrieve more than k values, the receiver is caught cheating with 1 -1/m probability (Protocol II) or the receiver is unable to get any value at all (Protocol III).We introduce a novel technique based on the solvability of linear equations, which could find its way into other applications.We also provide an experimental analysis to compare the efficiency of the protocols.