Abstract We present a highly efficient post-quantum Randomized Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) construction based on a novel TFHE key transformation technique. Unlike prior lattice-based OPRF schemes that rely on complex homomorphic PRF evaluation, our approach leverages the algebraic structure of TFHE to enable direct ciphertext transformation, resulting in significant performance improvements. Our protocol achieves strong security under the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption and provides session unlinkability, making it well-suited for privacy-preserving applications. We demonstrate the practical efficiency of our construction with a Rust implementation, achieving substantial speedups over existing schemes. Furthermore, we show how our Randomized OPRF can be adapted for use in the OPAQUE password-authenticated key exchange protocol by employing a singularization technique to ensure deterministic outputs when required. This work highlights a new, practical path for post-quantum OPRFs with strong privacy and efficiency guarantees.
Abstract We present a highly efficient post-quantum Randomized Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) construction based on a novel TFHE key transformation technique. Unlike prior lattice-based OPRF schemes that rely on complex homomorphic PRF evaluation, our approach leverages the algebraic structure of TFHE to enable direct ciphertext transformation, resulting in significant performance improvements. Our protocol achieves strong security under the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption and provides session unlinkability, making it well-suited for privacy-preserving applications. We demonstrate the practical efficiency of our construction with a Rust implementation, achieving substantial speedups over existing schemes. Furthermore, we show how our Randomized OPRF can be adapted for use in the OPAQUE password-authenticated key exchange protocol by employing a singularization technique to ensure deterministic outputs when required. This work highlights a new, practical path for post-quantum OPRFs with strong privacy and efficiency guarantees.
Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) and Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) are essential cryptographic primitives in privacy-preserving applications such as anonymous authentication, private set intersection (PSI), and decentralized identity. Existing constructions, however, rely on number-theoretic assumptions that are vulnerable to quantum attacks. This PhD research project focuses on constructing efficient and practical VRFs and OPRFs from lattice-based assumptions to ensure post-quantum security. A key obstacle in these constructions is the overhead of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), particularly range proofs, which are costly in terms of size and prover complexity. To address this, we investigate probabilistic techniques that relax exact correctness. In particular, we explore approximate range proofs and algebraic transformations, such as using automorphisms in polynomial rings to simulate inner product arguments via polynomial multiplication. These methods enable more efficient and scalable lattice-based constructions of VRFs, including group and context-bound variants, as well as OPRFs. The goal is to make these primitives practical for deployment in post-quantum privacy-preserving systems.
We construct protocols for oblivious pseudorandom functions (OPRFs) based on alternating moduli assumptions in the 'Crypto Dark Matter' paradigm (Boneh et al, TCC 2016). Prior OPRFs based on this type of assumption were only secure against a semi-honest adversary. We show how to obtain maliciously secure protocols, by leveraging new cut-and-choose techniques for generating correlated randomness based on vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE), which allow efficient conversions between different moduli in zero-knowledge and secure two-party computation. Compared with the state-of-the-art GOLD OPRF (Yang et al, S&P 2025), our construction has a faster online phase in all settings, as well as overall better efficiency in the small-batch setting. Furthermore, our construction supports obtaining a secret-shared output, and can be extended to handle secretshared inputs. This opens up additional applications in variants of private set intersection and secure database operations.
We propose Pool: a conceptually simple post-quantum (PQ) oblivious pseudorandom function (OPRF) protocol, that is round-optimal (with input-independent preprocessing), practically efficient, and has security based on the well-understood hardness of the learning with rounding (LWR) problem. Specifically, our design permits oblivious computation of the LWR-based pseudorandom function Fsk(x) = ⌉ H(x)⊤ ⋅ sk ⌋q,p, for random oracle H: {0,1} * → ℤ qn and uniformly chosen sk∈ {0,1} n. For 128-bits of semi-honest security, the Pool OPRF has an online communication cost of 11.9 kB, and a computational runtime of less than 3 ms on a single thread (via an open-source software implementation). This is more efficient (in either online communication cost or runtime) than constructions from well-known PQ PRFs, and is competitive even with constructions that only conjecture PQ security on lesser-known assumptions. As a result, our design gives high-performance, post-quantum variants of established OPRF applications in multi-party computation and private set operation protocols.
While tremendous progress has been made towards achieving highly efficient and practical Private Set Intersection (PSI) protocols during the last decade, the development of post-quantum PSI is still far from satisfactory. Existing post-quantum PSI protocols encounter a dilemma: while those based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) achieve low online communication, they suffer from significant online computation; conversely, protocols based on post-quantum Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) exhibit excellent online computational performance but incur substantially high online communication. To overcome this dilemma, we present a lattice-based PSI protocol that achieves optimal online performance in both communication and computation. Our solution introduces two core innovations: a robust signal comparison algorithm based on RLWE key exchange, which determines the intersection through signal consistency rather than direct shared key comparison, and an optimized Oblivious Key–Value Stores (OKVS) implementation featuring a composite key–value mapping for efficient handling of high-dimensional RLWE polynomials. We implement the protocol and conduct extensive benchmarks in both symmetric and asymmetric set-size settings. The results show that our construction achieves the lowest online overhead in both computation and communication among all tests. For example, with asymmetric set sizes (212,11041), the online phase requires only 0.132 s, yielding 19× and 282× improvements over FHE-based (CCS’21) and OPRF-based (EUROCRYPT’25) protocols, respectively. Even at (224,11041), our online communication time is only 0.201 s, which is 226× and 184× that of FHE-based and OPRF-based PSI, respectively. Additionally, our online communication overhead is the lowest in all tests; however, this comes at the cost of heavy offline communication overhead for very large set sizes, revealing a clear trade-off between pre-computation and online efficiency. This work addresses a critical gap in post-quantum PSI by delivering a protocol that achieves balanced online communication and computational overhead, thereby enabling broader practical deployment.
We propose plausible post-quantum (PQ) oblivious pseudorandom functions (OPRFs) based on the Power-Residue PRF (Damgård CRYPTO'88), a generalization of the Legendre PRF. For security parameterλ, we consider the PRF Goldk(x)that maps an integerxmodulo a public primep=2λ⋅g+1to the element(k+x)gmodp, wheregis public andlogg≈2λ. At the core of our constructions are efficient novel methods for evaluating Gold within two-party computation (2PC-Gold), achieving different security requirements. Here, the serverPsholds the PRF keykwhereas the clientPcholds the PRF inputx, and they jointly evaluate Gold in2PC. 2 PC-Gold uses standard Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) correlations and is information-theoretic and constant-round in the (V)OLE-hybrid model. We show: •For a semi-honestPsand a maliciousPc: a 2PC-Gold that just uses a single (V)OLE correlation, and has a communication complexity of 3 field elements (2 field elements if we only require a uniformly sampled key) and a computational complexity ofO(λ)field operations. We refer to this as half-malicious security. •For maliciousPsandPc: a 2PC-Gold that just uses4λ+O(1)VOLE correlations, and has a communication complexity of4λ+O(1)field elements and a computational complexity ofO(λ)field operations. These constructions support additional features and extensions, e.g., batched evaluations with better amortized costs wherePcrepeatedly evaluates the PRF under the same key. Furthermore, we extend 2PC-Gold to Verifiable OPRFs and use the methodology from Beullens et al. (Eurocrypt'25) to get strong OPRF security in the universally composable setting. All the protocols are efficient in practice. We implemented 2PC-Gold-with (PQ) VOLEs-and benchmarked them. For example, our half-malicious (resp. malicious) n-batched PQ OPRFs incur about 100B (resp. 1.9KB) of amortized communication forλ=128.
Password authentication is a prevalent method of user verification across the Internet, and its use extends to scenarios where resources are limited. However, current password authentication protocols primarily rely on traditional password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols (e.g., SRP, OPAQUE), which are vulnerable to attacks by quantum adversaries. To date, no efficient quantum algorithm has been found to solve the common challenges in lattice-based cryptography. Therefore, quantum-resistant PAKE protocols are generally built upon lattice-based cryptography. In this work, we propose a threshold verifiable oblivious pseudorandom function () protocol based on secret sharing. We then integrate it into a PAKE protocol and present an instantiation of a quantum-safe threshold PAKE protocol () based on the Ring Learning with Errors (RLWE) assumption. This integration gives our PAKE protocol resistance to precomputation attacks, similar to OPAQUE. Furthermore, by incorporating thresholding techniques into the PAKE protocol, we mitigate the risk of single points of failure on the server side. Our protocol not only preserves the security guarantees of traditional PAKE schemes but also resists attacks from quantum adversaries. We also provide a comprehensive security analysis and evaluation of, providing valuable insights for its practical implementation.