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IACR Communications in Cryptology

Tighter Concrete Security for the Simplest OT

Iftach Haitner, Gil Segev

Published Apr 8, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Chou-Orlandi batch oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is a particularly attractive OT protocol that bridges the gap between practical efficiency and strong security guarantees and is especially notable due to its simplicity. The security analysis provided by Chou and Orlandi bases the security of their protocol on the hardness of the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problem in prime-order groups. Concretely, in groups in which no better-than-generic algorithms are known for the CDH problem, their security analysis yields that an attacker running in time t and issuing q random-oracle queries breaks the security of their protocol with probability at most ϵ ≤ q 2 · t / 2 κ / 2 , where κ is the bit-length of the group's order. This concrete bound, however, is somewhat insufficient for 256-bit groups (e.g., for κ = 256 , it does not provide any guarantee already for t = 2 48 and q = 2 40 ). In this work, we establish a tighter concrete security bound for the Chou-Orlandi protocol. First, we introduce the list square Diffie-Hellman problem and present a tight reduction from the security of the protocol to the hardness of solving the list square Diffie-Hellman problem. That is, we completely shift the task of analyzing the concrete security of the protocol to that of analyzing the concrete hardness of the list square Diffie-Hellman problem. Second, we reduce the hardness of the list square Diffie-Hellman problem to that of the decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) problem without incurring a multiplicative loss. Our key observation is that although CDH and DDH have the same assumed concrete hardness, relying on the hardness of DDH enables our reduction to efficiently test the correctness of the solutions it produces. Concretely, in groups in which no better-than-generic algorithms are known for the DDH problem, our analysis yields that an attacker running in time t and issuing q ≤ t random-oracle queries breaks the security of the Chou-Orlandi protocol with probability at most ϵ ≤ t / 2 κ / 2 (i.e., we eliminate the above multiplicative q 2 term). We prove our results within the standard real-vs-ideal framework considering static corruptions by malicious adversaries, and provide a concrete security treatment by accounting for the statistical distance between a real-model execution and an ideal-model execution.

DOI
10.62056/akp2fhsfg

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The Chou-Orlandi batch oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is a particularly attractive OT protocol that bridges the gap between practical efficiency and strong security guarantees and is especially notable due to its simplicity. The security analysis provided by Chou and Orlandi bases the security of their protocol on the hardness of the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problem in prime-order groups. Concretely, in groups in which no better-than-generic algorithms are known for the CDH problem, their security analysis yields that an attacker running in time t and issuing q random-oracle queries breaks the security of their protocol with probability at most ϵ ≤ q 2 · t / 2 κ / 2 , where κ is the bit-length of the group's order. This concrete bound, however, is somewhat insufficient for 256-bit groups (e.g., for κ = 256 , it does not provide any guarantee already for t = 2 48 and q = 2 40 ). In this work, we establish a tighter concrete security bound for the Chou-Orlandi protocol. First, we introduce the list square Diffie-Hellman problem and present a tight reduction from the security of the protocol to the hardness of solving the list square Diffie-Hellman problem. That is, we completely shift the task of analyzing the concrete security of the protocol to that of analyzing the concrete hardness of the list square Diffie-Hellman problem. Second, we reduce the hardness of the list square Diffie-Hellman problem to that of the decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) problem without incurring a multiplicative loss. Our key observation is that although CDH and DDH have the same assumed concrete hardness, relying on the hardness of DDH enables our reduction to efficiently test the correctness of the solutions it produces. Concretely, in groups in which no better-than-generic algorithms are known for the DDH problem, our analysis yields that an attacker running in time t and issuing q ≤ t random-oracle queries breaks the security of the Chou-Orlandi protocol with probability at most ϵ ≤ t / 2 κ / 2 (i.e., we eliminate the above multiplicative q 2 term). We prove our results within the standard real-vs-ideal framework considering static corruptions by malicious adversaries, and provide a concrete security treatment by accounting for the statistical distance between a real-model execution and an ideal-model execution.
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.
Oblivious Transfer (OT) is the fundamental building block of cryptographic protocols. In this paper we describe the simplest and most efficient protocol for 1-out-of- n OT to date, which is obtained by tweaking the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol. The protocol achieves UC-security against active and adaptive corruptions in the random oracle model. Due to its simplicity, the protocol is extremely efficient and it allows to perform m 1-out-of- n OTs using only: Computation: (n+1)m+2(n+1)m+2(n+1)m+2 exponentiations ( mn for the receiver, mn+2mn+2mn+2 for the sender) and Communication: 32(m+1)32(m+1)32(m+1) bytes (for the group elements), and 2 mn ciphertexts. We also report on an implementation of the protocol using elliptic curves, and on a number of mechanisms we employ to ensure that our software is secure against active attacks too. Experimental results show that our protocol (thanks to both algorithmic and implementation optimizations) is at least one order of magnitude faster than previous work. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) allow a client to evaluate a pseudorandom function (PRF) on her secret input based on a key that is held by a server. In the process, the client only learns the PRF output but not the key, while the server neither learns the input nor the output of the client. The arguably most popular OPRF is due to Naor, Pinkas and Reingold (Eurocrypt 2009). It is based on an Oblivious Exponentiation by the server, with passive security under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. In this work, we strengthen the security guarantees of the NPR OPRF by protecting it against active attacks of the server. We have implemented our solution and report on the performance. Our main result is a new batch OPRF protocol which is secure against maliciously corrupted servers, but is essentially as efficient as the semi-honest solution. More precisely, the computation (and communication) overhead is a multiplicative factor o ( 1 ) as the batch size increases. The obvious solution using zero-knowledge proofs would have a constant factor overhead at best, which can be too expensive for certain deployments. Our protocol relies on a novel version of the DDH problem, which we call the Oblivious Exponentiation Problem (OEP), and we give evidence for its hardness in the Generic Group model. We also present a variant of our maliciously secure protocol that does not rely on the OEP but nevertheless only has overhead o ( 1 ) over the known semi-honest protocol. Moreover, we show that our techniques can also be used to efficiently protect threshold blind BLS signing and threshold ElGamal decryption against malicious attackers.
Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a core building block for many multiparty cryptographic protocols. While existing OT extension techniques achieve excellent asymptotic efficiency for very large batches, their performance degrades when the total number of OTs is only moderate, since the cost of generating the required base OTs is no longer effectively amortized. In this work, we close this gap by presenting OT constructions that achieve square-root communication complexity for batched OT generation. Concretely, our most efficient protocol generates ell random OTs using O(lambda sqrt(ell)) bits of communication, where lambda is the security parameter. Our constructions are inspired by recent advances in homomorphic secret sharing and techniques for distributed discrete logarithm computation, and explore complementary points in the design space. The first construction is based on the Damgård-Jurik cryptosystem and standard assumptions, at the cost of a one-time trusted setup. The second eliminates the need for trusted setup, relying instead on a power-DDH assumption over prime-order groups. For 128-bit security, our schemes require approximately 2.6 KiB and 1.25 KiB of communication, respectively, to generate 128 random OTs, including the hash key in the power-DDH construction. Our best construction outperforms existing OT extension techniques for batch sizes of up to 32,768 OTs.
A Framework For Fully-Simulatable hhh-Out-Of-nnn Oblivious Transfer
We present a framework for fully-simulatable hhh-out-of-nnn oblivious transfer (OThnOT^{n}_{h}OThn​) with security against non-adaptive malicious adversaries. The framework costs six communication rounds and costs at most 40n40n40n public-key operations in computational overhead. Compared with the known protocols for fully-simulatable oblivious transfer that works in the plain mode (where there is no trusted common reference string available) and proven to be secure under standard model (where there is no random oracle available), the instantiation based on the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption of the framework is the most efficient one, no matter seen from communication rounds or computational overhead. Our framework uses three abstract tools, i.e., perfectly binding commitment, perfectly hiding commitment and our new smooth projective hash. This allows a simple and intuitive understanding of its security. We instantiate the new smooth projective hash under the lattice assumption, the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption, the decisional NNN-th residuosity assumption, the decisional quadratic residuosity assumption. This indeed shows that the folklore that it is technically difficult to instantiate the projective hash framework under the lattice assumption is not true. What's more, by using this lattice-based hash and lattice-based commitment scheme, we gain a concrete protocol for OThnOT^{n}_{h}OThn​ which is secure against quantum algorithms.
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].