Oblivious transfer and privacy amplification (Q1879418)

One-of-the-two \(k\)-bits string oblivious transfer (OT) is an important cryptographic primitive, and it is already known that string OT may be directly reduced to one-of-two bits OT. In the paper a new approach to the reduction problem is presented. The new construction makes use of the privacy amplification technique -- the approach allows for a simpler, more general and more efficient protocol, but at the cost of a small probability of failure. Another advantage of the technique over the previous approaches is that it allows for reducing string OT to (apparently) much weaker primitives such as generalized OT or universal OT. Thus, the privacy amplification method is better than previously used methods provided that one is willing to accept an exponentially small probability of failure.