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ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

From OT to OLE with Subquadratic Communication

Jack Doerner, Iftach Haitner, Yuval Ishai, Nikolaos Makriyannis

Published Nov 19, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Oblivious Linear Evaluation (OLE) is an algebraic generalization of oblivious transfer (OT) that forms a critical part of a growing number of applications. An OLE protocol over a modulus q enables the receiver party to securely evaluate a line a⋅ X+b chosen by the sender party on a secret point x∈ ℤq. Motivated by the big efficiency gap between OLE and OT and by fast OT extension techniques, we revisit the question of reducing OLE to OT, aiming to improve the communication cost of known reductions.

DOI
10.1145/3719027.3765225

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TinyOLE

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We introduce a new approach to actively secure two-party computation based on so-called oblivious linear function evaluation (OLE), a natural generalisation of oblivious transfer (OT) and a special case of the notion of oblivious polynomial evaluation introduced by Naor and Pinkas at STOC 1999. OLE works over a finite field F. In an OLE the sender inputs two field elements a ƒ F and b ƒ F, and the receiver inputs a field element x ∈ F and learns only ƒx) = ax + b. Our protocol can evaluate an arithmetic circuit over a finite field F given black-box access to OLE for F. The protocol is unconditionally secure and consumes only a constant number of OLEs per multiplication gate. An OLE over a field F of size O(2κ) be implemented with communication O(κ). This gives a protocol with communication complexity O(C κ) for large enough fields, where C is an arithmetic circuit computing the desired function.

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TinyOLE: Efficient Actively Secure Two-Party Computation from Oblivious Linear Function Evaluation.

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We introduce a new approach to actively secure two-party computation based on so-called oblivious linear function evaluation (OLE), a natural generalisation of oblivious transfer (OT) and a special case of the notion of oblivious polynomial evaluation introduced by Naor and Pinkas at STOC 1999. OLE works over a finite field F. In an OLE the sender inputs two field elements a ƒ F and b ƒ F, and the receiver inputs a field element x ∈ F and learns only ƒx) = ax + b. Our protocol can evaluate an arithmetic circuit over a finite field F given black-box access to OLE for F. The protocol is unconditionally secure and consumes only a constant number of OLEs per multiplication gate. An OLE over a field F of size O(2κ) be implemented with communication O(κ). This gives a protocol with communication complexity O(C κ) for large enough fields, where C is an arithmetic circuit computing the desired function. This asymptotically matches the best previous protocols, but our protocol at the same time obtains significantly smaller constants hidden by the big-O notation, yielding a highly practical protocol. Conceptually our techniques lift the techniques for basing practical actively secure 2PC of Boolean circuits on OT introduced under the name TinyOT by Nielsen, Nordholt, Orlandi and Burra at Crypto 2012 to the arithmetic setting. In doing so we develop several novel techniques for generating various flavours of OLE and combining these. We believe that the efficiency of our protocols, both in asymptotic and practical terms, establishes OLE and its variants as an important foundation for efficient actively secure 2PC.

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Efficient oblivious transfer protocols

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1 IntroductionOblivious Transfer (OT) protocols allow one party, the sender, to transmit part of its inputs to another party, the chooser, in a manner that protects both of them: the sender is assured that the chooser does not receive more information than it is entitled, while the chooser is assured that the sender does not learn which part of the inputs it received. OT is used as a key component in many applications of cryptography. Its computational requirements are quite demanding and they are likely to be the bottleneck in many applications that invoke it.1.1 Contributions.This paper presents several significant improvements to oblivious transfer (OT) protocols of strings, and in particular: (i) Improving the efficiency of applications which many invocations of oblivious transfer. (ii) Providing the first two-round OT protocol whose security analysis does not invoke the random oracle model.

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Faster Oblivious Transfer Extension and Its Impact on Secure Computation

Michael Zohner

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.

•Jan 1, 2017•0 citations
Oblivious Linear Evaluation (OLE) is an algebraic generalization of oblivious transfer (OT) that forms a critical part of a growing number of applications. An OLE protocol over a modulus q enables the receiver party to securely evaluate a line a⋅ X+b chosen by the sender party on a secret point x∈ ℤq. Motivated by the big efficiency gap between OLE and OT and by fast OT extension techniques, we revisit the question of reducing OLE to OT, aiming to improve the communication cost of known reductions.
We introduce a new approach to actively secure two-party computation based on so-called oblivious linear function evaluation (OLE), a natural generalisation of oblivious transfer (OT) and a special case of the notion of oblivious polynomial evaluation introduced by Naor and Pinkas at STOC 1999. OLE works over a finite field F. In an OLE the sender inputs two field elements a ƒ F and b ƒ F, and the receiver inputs a field element x ∈ F and learns only ƒx) = ax + b. Our protocol can evaluate an arithmetic circuit over a finite field F given black-box access to OLE for F. The protocol is unconditionally secure and consumes only a constant number of OLEs per multiplication gate. An OLE over a field F of size O(2κ) be implemented with communication O(κ). This gives a protocol with communication complexity O(C κ) for large enough fields, where C is an arithmetic circuit computing the desired function.
We introduce a new approach to actively secure two-party computation based on so-called oblivious linear function evaluation (OLE), a natural generalisation of oblivious transfer (OT) and a special case of the notion of oblivious polynomial evaluation introduced by Naor and Pinkas at STOC 1999. OLE works over a finite field F. In an OLE the sender inputs two field elements a ƒ F and b ƒ F, and the receiver inputs a field element x ∈ F and learns only ƒx) = ax + b. Our protocol can evaluate an arithmetic circuit over a finite field F given black-box access to OLE for F. The protocol is unconditionally secure and consumes only a constant number of OLEs per multiplication gate. An OLE over a field F of size O(2κ) be implemented with communication O(κ). This gives a protocol with communication complexity O(C κ) for large enough fields, where C is an arithmetic circuit computing the desired function. This asymptotically matches the best previous protocols, but our protocol at the same time obtains significantly smaller constants hidden by the big-O notation, yielding a highly practical protocol. Conceptually our techniques lift the techniques for basing practical actively secure 2PC of Boolean circuits on OT introduced under the name TinyOT by Nielsen, Nordholt, Orlandi and Burra at Crypto 2012 to the arithmetic setting. In doing so we develop several novel techniques for generating various flavours of OLE and combining these. We believe that the efficiency of our protocols, both in asymptotic and practical terms, establishes OLE and its variants as an important foundation for efficient actively secure 2PC.
An oblivious linear function evaluation protocol, or OLE, is a two-party protocol for the function f ( x ) = a x + b, where a sender inputs the field elements a, b, and a receiver inputs x and learns f ( x ). OLE can be used to build secret-shared multiplication, and is an essential component of many secure computation applications including general-purpose multi-party computation, private set intersection and more. In this work, we present several efficient OLE protocols from the ring learning with errors (RLWE) assumption. Technically, we build two new passively secure protocols, which build upon recent advances in homomorphic secret sharing from (R)LWE (Boyle et al. in: EUROCRYPT 2019, Part II (2019) 3–33 Springer), with optimizations tailored to the setting of OLE. We upgrade these to active security using efficient amortized zero-knowledge techniques for lattice relations (Baum et al. in: CRYPTO 2018, Part II (2018) 669–699 Springer), and design new variants of zero-knowledge arguments that are necessary for some of our constructions. Our protocols offer several advantages over existing constructions. Firstly, they have the lowest communication complexity amongst previous, practical protocols from RLWE and other assumptions; secondly, they are conceptually very simple, and have just one round of interaction for the case of OLE where b is randomly chosen. We demonstrate this with an implementation of one of our passively secure protocols, which can perform more than 1 million OLEs per second over the ring Z m , for a 120-bit modulus m, on standard hardware.
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.
1 IntroductionOblivious Transfer (OT) protocols allow one party, the sender, to transmit part of its inputs to another party, the chooser, in a manner that protects both of them: the sender is assured that the chooser does not receive more information than it is entitled, while the chooser is assured that the sender does not learn which part of the inputs it received. OT is used as a key component in many applications of cryptography. Its computational requirements are quite demanding and they are likely to be the bottleneck in many applications that invoke it.1.1 Contributions.This paper presents several significant improvements to oblivious transfer (OT) protocols of strings, and in particular: (i) Improving the efficiency of applications which many invocations of oblivious transfer. (ii) Providing the first two-round OT protocol whose security analysis does not invoke the random oracle model.
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.