Oblivious transfer (OT) is a two-party protocol between a sender and a receiver, by which the sender transfers some information to the receiver, the sender remaining oblivious, however, to what information the receiver actually obtains. The most basic form of oblivious transfer, as introduced by Rabin [4], is a protocol achieving the following functionality. The sender uses one bit b as its private input to the protocol; the receiver does not provide any private input to the protocol. At the completion of the protocol, the receiver either gets the bit b or an undefined value ⊥. Both cases occur with probability 50%, and the receiver knows whether it gets b or ⊥. However, the sender does not know whether bit b was transferred successfully or not.
Despite its somewhat strange functionality, OT turns out to be sufficiently powerful to construct a secure multiparty computation for any computable function, as follows from the completeness result proved by Kilian [3]. In many cases, a...
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References
Bellare, M. and S. Micali (1989). “Non-interactive oblivious transfer and application.” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO'89, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 435, ed. G. Brassand. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Crépeau, C. (1987). “Equivalence between two flavours of oblivious transfer.” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO'87, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 293, ed. C. Pomerance. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 350–354.
Kilian, J. (1988). “Basing crpytography on oblivious transfer”. Proceedings of 20th Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC'88). ACM Press, New York, 20–31.
Rabin, M. (1981). “How to exchange secrets by oblivious transfer.” Technical Memo TR-81, Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University.
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Schoenmakers, B. (2005). Oblivious Transfer. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_285
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