5 research outputs found
A New Upperbound for the Oblivious Transfer Capacity of Discrete Memoryless Channels
We derive a new upper bound on the string oblivious transfer capacity of
discrete memoryless channels. The main tool we use is the tension region of a
pair of random variables introduced in Prabhakaran and Prabhakaran (2014) where
it was used to derive upper bounds on rates of secure sampling in the source
model. In this paper, we consider secure computation of string oblivious
transfer in the channel model. Our bound is based on a monotonicity property of
the tension region in the channel model. We show that our bound strictly
improves upon the upper bound of Ahlswede and Csisz\'ar (2013).Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, extended version of submission to IEEE
Information Theory Workshop, 201
Converses for Secret Key Agreement and Secure Computing
We consider information theoretic secret key agreement and secure function
computation by multiple parties observing correlated data, with access to an
interactive public communication channel. Our main result is an upper bound on
the secret key length, which is derived using a reduction of binary hypothesis
testing to multiparty secret key agreement. Building on this basic result, we
derive new converses for multiparty secret key agreement. Furthermore, we
derive converse results for the oblivious transfer problem and the bit
commitment problem by relating them to secret key agreement. Finally, we derive
a necessary condition for the feasibility of secure computation by trusted
parties that seek to compute a function of their collective data, using an
interactive public communication that by itself does not give away the value of
the function. In many cases, we strengthen and improve upon previously known
converse bounds. Our results are single-shot and use only the given joint
distribution of the correlated observations. For the case when the correlated
observations consist of independent and identically distributed (in time)
sequences, we derive strong versions of previously known converses
Universal Hashing for Information Theoretic Security
The information theoretic approach to security entails harnessing the
correlated randomness available in nature to establish security. It uses tools
from information theory and coding and yields provable security, even against
an adversary with unbounded computational power. However, the feasibility of
this approach in practice depends on the development of efficiently
implementable schemes. In this article, we review a special class of practical
schemes for information theoretic security that are based on 2-universal hash
families. Specific cases of secret key agreement and wiretap coding are
considered, and general themes are identified. The scheme presented for wiretap
coding is modular and can be implemented easily by including an extra
pre-processing layer over the existing transmission codes.Comment: Corrected an error in the proof of Lemma