A generic construction to build simple oblivious transfer protocols from homomorphic encryption schemes

Oblivious transfer is a fundamental problem in cryptography where it is required that a sender transfers one of potentially many pieces of information to a receiver and at the same time remains oblivious as to which piece has been transferred. There exist many oblivious transfer protocols in the literature; however, most of them lack efficiency needed in practical situations. To fill this gap, we employ the notion of asymmetric homomorphic encryption and propose a generic construction to build simple and efficient oblivious transfer protocols. We then instantiate our construction with some well-known homomorphic encryption schemes such as RSA, Paillier and NTRU to obtain concrete oblivious transfer protocols. We further prove that our generic construction is secure in the universal composable framework.

Automated summary

The paper discusses the importance of oblivious transfer in cryptography and proposes a generic construction based on asymmetric homomorphic encryption for building simple and efficient oblivious transfer protocols. The construction is instantiated with well-known homomorphic encryption schemes such as RSA, Paillier, and NTRU, and its security is further proven in the universal composable framework.