On the Oblivious Transfer Capacity of Generalized Erasure Channels Against Malicious Adversaries: The Case of Low Erasure Probability

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information theory Vol. 63; no. 10; pp. 6819 - 6826
• Main Authors: Dowsley, Rafael, Nascimento, Anderson C. A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Channels; Cryptography; Encoding; generalized erasure channel; Information theory; information-theoretic security; Lower bounds; malicious adversaries; Noise measurement; Oblivious transfer; oblivious transfer capacity; Probability distribution; Protocols; Random variables; Upper bounds
• ISSN: 0018-9448; 1557-9654
• DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2017.2735423

Noisy channels are a powerful resource for cryptography as they can be used to obtain information-theoretic secure key agreement, commitment, and oblivious transfer protocols, among others. Oblivious transfer (OT) is a fundamental primitive, since it is complete for secure multi-party computation, and the OT capacity characterizes how efficiently a channel can be used for obtaining string oblivious transfer. Ahlswede and Csiszár (ISIT'07) presented upper and lower bounds on the OT capacity of generalized erasure channels (GECs) against passive adversaries. In the case of GEC with erasure probability at least 1/2, the upper and lower bounds match and, therefore, the OT capacity was determined. It was later proved by Pinto et al. [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 57(8)] that the OT capacity is identical for passive and malicious adversaries. In the case of GEC with erasure probability smaller than 1/2, the known lower bound against passive adversaries that was established by Ahlswede and Csiszár does not match their upper bound and it was unknown whether this OT rate could be achieved against malicious adversaries as well. In this paper, we show that there is a protocol against malicious adversaries achieving the same OT rate that was obtained against passive adversaries. We obtain our results by a new combination of interactive hashing and typicality tests that are suitable for dealing with the case of low erasure probability (p* <;1/2 ).