On the Efficiency of Classical and Quantum Oblivious Transfer Reductions

Due to its universality oblivious transfer (OT) is a primitive of great importance in secure multi-party computation. OT is impossible to implement from scratch in an unconditionally secure way, but there are many reductions of OT to other variants of OT, as well as other primitives such as noisy channels. It is important to know how efficient such unconditionally secure reductions can be in principle, i.e., how many instances of a given primitive are at least needed to implement OT. For perfect (error-free) implementations good lower bounds are known, e.g. the bounds by Beaver (STOC \u2796) or by Dodis and Micali (EUROCRYPT \u2799). However, in practice one is usually willing to tolerate a small probability of error and it is known that these statistical reductions can in general be much more efficient. Thus, the known bounds have only limited application. In the first part of this work we provide bounds on the efficiency of secure (one-sided) two-party computation of arbitrary finite functions from distributed randomness in the statistical case. From these results we derive bounds on the efficiency of protocols that use (different variants of) OT as a black-box. When applied to implementations of OT, our bounds generalize known results to the statistical case. Our results hold in particular for transformations between a finite number of primitives and for any error. Furthermore, we provide bounds on the efficiency of protocols implementing Rabin OT. In the second part we study the efficiency of quantum protocols implementing OT. Recently, Salvail, Schaffner and Sotakova (ASIACRYPT \u2709) showed that most classical lower bounds for perfectly secure reductions of OT to distributed randomness still hold in a quantum setting. We present a statistically secure protocol that violates these bounds by an arbitrarily large factor. We then present a weaker lower bound that does hold in the statistical quantum setting. We use this bound to show that even quantum protocols cannot extend OT. Finally, we present two lower bounds for reductions of OT to commitments and a protocol based on string commitments that is optimal with respect to both of these bounds

On the Efficiency of Classical and Quantum Secure Function Evaluation

We provide bounds on the efficiency of secure one-sided output two-party computation of arbitrary finite functions from trusted distributed randomness in the statistical case. From these results we derive bounds on the efficiency of protocols that use different variants of OT as a black-box. When applied to implementations of OT, these bounds generalize most known results to the statistical case. Our results hold in particular for transformations between a finite number of primitives and for any error. In the second part we study the efficiency of quantum protocols implementing OT. While most classical lower bounds for perfectly secure reductions of OT to distributed randomness still hold in the quantum setting, we present a statistically secure protocol that violates these bounds by an arbitrarily large factor. We then prove a weaker lower bound that does hold in the statistical quantum setting and implies that even quantum protocols cannot extend OT. Finally, we present two lower bounds for reductions of OT to commitments and a protocol based on string commitments that is optimal with respect to both of these bounds

On the Communication Complexity of Secure Computation

Information theoretically secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a central primitive of modern cryptography. However, relatively little is known about the communication complexity of this primitive. In this work, we develop powerful information theoretic tools to prove lower bounds on the communication complexity of MPC. We restrict ourselves to a 3-party setting in order to bring out the power of these tools without introducing too many complications. Our techniques include the use of a data processing inequality for residual information - i.e., the gap between mutual information and G\'acs-K\"orner common information, a new information inequality for 3-party protocols, and the idea of distribution switching by which lower bounds computed under certain worst-case scenarios can be shown to apply for the general case. Using these techniques we obtain tight bounds on communication complexity by MPC protocols for various interesting functions. In particular, we show concrete functions that have "communication-ideal" protocols, which achieve the minimum communication simultaneously on all links in the network. Also, we obtain the first explicit example of a function that incurs a higher communication cost than the input length in the secure computation model of Feige, Kilian and Naor (1994), who had shown that such functions exist. We also show that our communication bounds imply tight lower bounds on the amount of randomness required by MPC protocols for many interesting functions.Comment: 37 page

Cryptography Based on Correlated Data: Foundations and Practice

Correlated data can be very useful in cryptography. For instance, if a uniformly random key is available to Alice and Bob, it can be used as an one-time pad to transmit a message with perfect security. With more elaborate forms of correlated data, the parties can achieve even more complex cryptographic tasks, such as secure multiparty computation. This thesis explores (from both a theoretical and a practical point of view) the topic of cryptography based on correlated data