Quantum Oblivious Transfer with Reusable Bell State

Abstract

In cryptography, oblivious transfer (OT) is an important multi-party cryptographic primitive and protocol, that is suitable for many upper-layer applications, such as secure computation, remote coin-flipping, electrical contract signing and exchanging secrets simultaneously. However, some no-go theorems have been established, indicating that one-out-of-two quantum oblivious transfer (QOT) protocols with unconditional security are impossible. Fortunately, some one-out-of-two QOT protocols using the concept of Crépeau’s reduction have been demonstrated not to conform to Lo’s no-go theorem, but these protocols require more quantum resources to generate classical keys using all-or-nothing QOT to construct one-out-of-two QOT. This paper proposes a novel and efficient one-out-of-two QOT which uses quantum resources directly instead of wasting unnecessary resources to generate classical keys. The proposed protocol is not covered by Lo’s no-go theorem, and it is able to check the sender’s loyalty and avoid the attack from the receiver. Moreover, the entangled state of the proposed protocol is reusable, so it can provide more services for the participants when necessary. Compared with other QOT protocols, the proposed protocol is more secure, efficient, and flexible, which not only can prevent external and internal attacks, but also reduce the required resources and resource distribution time.