An Experimental Implementation of Oblivious Transfer in the Noisy Storage Model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental implementation of a 1-2 random oblivious transfer protocol using entangled photons, showing the practicality of quantum technologies for secure two-party cryptographic tasks within the noisy storage model.

Contribution

It presents the first experimental realization of a 1-2 ROT protocol with security analysis under the noisy storage model using current quantum technology.

Findings

Successfully exchanged 1,366 bits in ~3 minutes

Full security analysis including error rates and finite size effects

Feasibility of quantum technology for secure two-party protocols

Abstract

Cryptography's importance in our everyday lives continues to grow in our increasingly digital world. Oblivious transfer (OT) has long been a fundamental and important cryptographic primitive since it is known that general two-party cryptographic tasks can be built from this basic building block. Here we show the experimental implementation of a 1-2 random oblivious transfer (ROT) protocol by performing measurements on polarization-entangled photon pairs in a modified entangled quantum key distribution system, followed by all of the necessary classical post-processing including one-way error correction. We successfully exchange a 1,366 bits ROT string in ~3 min and include a full security analysis under the noisy storage model, accounting for all experimental error rates and finite size effects. This demonstrates the feasibility of using today's quantum technologies to implement secure two-party protocols.