Supersonic OT: Fast Unconditionally Secure Oblivious Transfer

TL;DR

Supersonic OT introduces a highly efficient, unconditionally secure oblivious transfer protocol that operates without public-key cryptography, achieving significant speed improvements suitable for practical secure computation applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel, unconditionally secure OT scheme that is faster and simpler than existing methods, avoiding public-key primitives and enabling practical deployment.

Findings

Completes in 0.35 milliseconds per instance

Up to 2000 times faster than current base OT protocols

Employs simple cryptographic primitives and a third-party helper

Abstract

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic protocol with applications in secure Multi-Party Computation, Federated Learning, and Private Set Intersection. With the advent of quantum computing, it is crucial to develop unconditionally secure core primitives like OT to ensure their continued security in the post-quantum era. Despite over four decades since OT's introduction, the literature has predominantly relied on computational assumptions, except in cases using unconventional methods like noisy channels or a fully trusted party. Introducing "Supersonic OT", a highly efficient and unconditionally secure OT scheme that avoids public-key-based primitives, we offer an alternative to traditional approaches. Supersonic OT enables a receiver to obtain a response of size O(1). Its simple (yet non-trivial) design facilitates easy security analysis and implementation. The protocol employs a basic secret-sharing scheme, controlled swaps, the one-time pad, and a third-party helper who may be corrupted by a semi-honest adversary. Our implementation and runtime analysis indicate that a single instance of Supersonic OT completes in 0.35 milliseconds, making it up to 2000 times faster than the state-of-the-art base OT.