Modern distributed computing systems and applications with strict privacy requirements demand robust data confidentiality. A primary challenge involves enabling parties to exchange data or perform joint computations. These interactions must avoid revealing private information about the data. Protocols with the obliviousness property, known as oblivious protocols, address this issue. They ensure that no party learns more than necessary. This survey analyzes the security and performance of post-quantum oblivious protocols, with a focus on oblivious transfer and oblivious pseudorandom functions. The evaluation assesses resilience against malicious adversaries in the Universal Composability framework. Efficiency is quantified through communication and computational overhead. It identifies optimal scenarios for these protocols. This paper also surveys related primitives, such as oblivious signatures and data structures, along with their applications. Key findings highlight the inherent trade-offs between computational cost and communication complexity in post-quantum oblivious constructions. Open challenges and future research directions are outlined. Emphasis is placed on quantum-resistant designs and formal security proofs in stronger adversarial models.
Modern distributed computing systems and applications with strict privacy requirements demand robust data confidentiality. A primary challenge involves enabling parties to exchange data or perform joint computations. These interactions must avoid revealing private information about the data. Protocols with the obliviousness property, known as oblivious protocols, address this issue. They ensure that no party learns more than necessary. This survey analyzes the security and performance of post-quantum oblivious protocols, with a focus on oblivious transfer and oblivious pseudorandom functions. The evaluation assesses resilience against malicious adversaries in the Universal Composability framework. Efficiency is quantified through communication and computational overhead. It identifies optimal scenarios for these protocols. This paper also surveys related primitives, such as oblivious signatures and data structures, along with their applications. Key findings highlight the inherent trade-offs between computational cost and communication complexity in post-quantum oblivious constructions. Open challenges and future research directions are outlined. Emphasis is placed on quantum-resistant designs and formal security proofs in stronger adversarial models.
The advent of quantum computing presents a paradigm shift in modern cybersecurity, threatening the foundations of classical cryptographic systems such as RSA, ECC, and Diffie–Hellman key exchange. Quantum algorithms like Shor’s and Grover’s can efficiently break these schemes, rendering existing encryption mechanisms vulnerable and obsolete. This growing risk necessitates the development of quantum-resilient or post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) solutions that can safeguard data and computation in the era of quantum networks. Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), a cornerstone of privacy-preserving computation, enables multiple entities to jointly compute a function over their private inputs without revealing them. However, its traditional security assumptions are also undermined by quantum threats. This research aims to explore and evaluate quantum-safe cryptographic protocols for integrating PQC into SMPC frameworks, thereby ensuring both confidentiality and correctness even in the presence of quantum-capable adversaries. The study focuses on lattice-based, hash-based, and code-based cryptographic primitives, analyzing their resilience, efficiency, and scalability when applied to distributed systems. A comparative framework is proposed to assess the performance and security trade-offs of different post-quantum SMPC implementations under realistic network conditions. The findings are expected to contribute to the design of a new class of cryptographic protocols capable of resisting quantum attacks, supporting the secure functioning of next-generation networks, and guiding policymakers and technologists toward practical post-quantum standardization. Ultimately, this research strengthens the bridge between theoretical cryptography and real-world cybersecurity readiness in the post-quantum era.
The advent of quantum computing poses a significant threat to the security of current cryptographic systems, including those underpinning secure multi-party computation (MPC). While considerable research has focused on developing post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) primitives, their integration into MPC protocols often inherits the computational security assumptions characteristic of classical cryptography. This paper explores the information-theoretic foundations for designing and analyzing post-quantum secure MPC protocols, aiming to achieve security guarantees that are independent of computational hardness assumptions and resilient against adversaries with unbounded computational power, including quantum adversaries. We delve into how information-theoretic primitives, such as secret sharing and oblivious transfer, can be adapted or combined with post-quantum techniques to construct MPC protocols with enhanced security. The work reviews existing paradigms, identifies challenges in achieving robust post-quantum information-theoretic security, and proposes conceptual frameworks for constructing such protocols. We examine the trade-offs between information-theoretic security, efficiency, and the practical implementation of post-quantum MPC, offering a theoretical perspective on how to achieve strong, long-term security in a quantum era. Our findings suggest that a hybrid approach, leveraging the strengths of both information theory and carefully selected post-quantum primitives, is crucial for building resilient MPC solutions.
Secure computation is a powerful cryptographic tool that encompasses the evaluation of any multivariate function with arbitrary inputs from mutually distrusting parties. The oblivious transfer primitive serves is a basic building block for the general task of secure multi-party computation. Therefore, analyzing the security in the universal composability framework becomes mandatory when dealing with multi-party computation protocols composed of oblivious transfer subroutines. Furthermore, since the required number of oblivious transfer instances scales with the size of the circuits, oblivious transfer remains as a bottleneck for large-scale multi-party computation implementations. Techniques that allow one to extend a small number of oblivious transfers into a larger one in an efficient way make use of the oblivious transfer variant called randomized oblivious transfer. In this work, we present randomized versions of two known oblivious transfer protocols, one quantum and another post-quantum with ring learning with an error assumption. We then prove their security in the quantum universal composability framework, in a common reference string model.
Motivated by the applications of secure multi-party computation as a privacy-protecting data analysis tool, and identifying oblivious transfer as one of its main practical enablers, we propose a practical realization of randomized quantum oblivious transfer. By using only symmetric cryptography primitives to implement commitments, we construct computationally secure randomized oblivious transfer without the need for public-key cryptography or assumptions imposing limitations on the adversarial devices. We show that the protocol is secure under an indistinguishability-based notion of security and demonstrate an experimental implementation to test its real-world performance. Its security and performance are then compared to both quantum and classical alternatives, showing potential advantages over existing solutions based on the noisy storage model and public-key cryptography.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a critical threat to classical cryptographic schemes that secure modern distributed systems. As the deployment of distributed infrastructures—including blockchains, cloud-native applications, and edge networks—continues to grow, there is an urgent need to transition towards quantum-resistant security mechanisms. This paper provides a comprehensive examination of post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms and their applicability in distributed system architectures. We analyze the impact of quantum threats on key components of distributed systems such as communication protocols, identity management, data integrity, and consensus mechanisms. Furthermore, we evaluate current NIST-standardized PQC algorithms in terms of computational efficiency, scalability, and integration overhead within distributed environments. Challenges in key management, performance trade-offs, and implementation considerations are discussed. Finally, we propose best practices and future directions for secure, quantum-resilient distributed systems.
With the ever-growing concern for internet security, the field of quantum cryptography emerges as a promising solution for enhancing the security of networking systems. In this paper, 20 notable papers from leading conferences and journals are reviewed and categorized based on their focus on various aspects of quantum cryptography, including key distribution, quantum bit commitment, post-quantum cryptography, and counterfactual quantum key distribution. The paper explores the motivations and challenges of employing quantum cryptography, addressing security and privacy concerns along with existing solutions. Secure key distribution, a critical component in ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted information over a network, is emphasized in the discussion. The survey examines the potential of quantum cryptography to enable secure key exchange between parties, even when faced with eavesdropping, and other applications of quantum cryptography. Additionally, the paper analyzes the methodologies, findings, and limitations of each reviewed study, pinpointing trends such as the increasing focus on practical implementation of quantum cryptography protocols and the growing interest in post-quantum cryptography research. Furthermore, the survey identifies challenges and open research questions, including the need for more efficient quantum repeater networks, improved security proofs for continuous variable quantum key distribution, and the development of quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms, showing future directions for the field of quantum cryptography.