Jamie Sikora

Oblivious transfer is a cryptographic primitive where Alice has two bits and Bob wishes to learn some function of them. Ideally, Alice should not learn Bob’s desired function choice and Bob should not learn any more than logically implied by the function value. While decent quantum protocols for this task are known, many quickly become insecure if an adversary were to control the quantum devices used in the implementation of the protocol. Here we present how some existing protocols fail in this device-independent framework, and give a fully-device independent quantum protocol for XOR oblivious transfer which is provably more secure than any classical protocol.

Rabin oblivious transfer is the cryptographic task where Alice wishes to receive a bit from Bob but it may get lost with probability 1/2. In this work, we provide protocol designs which yield quantum protocols with improved security. Moreover, we provide a constant lower bound on any Rabin oblivious transfer protocol. To quantify the security of this task with asymmetric cheating notions, we introduce the notion of cheating advantage which may be of independent interest in the study of other asymmetric cryptographic primitives as well.