On unconditionally secure distributed oblivious transfer (Q2642256)

An analysis and new results for 1-out-of-\(n\) distributed oblivious transfer are presented. In the setting considered the sender holds \(n\) secrets, the receiver is interested in one of them, and the sender delegates \(m\) Servers to accomplish the 1-out-of-\(n\) oblivious transfer. The crucial security requirement is that the receiver after interaction with any \(k\) of servers recovers just one secret but gets no information on the others, and on the other side any coalition of \(k-1\) servers cannot compute any secret nor to determine which secret receiver has recovered. The basic framework are unconditionally secure distributed oblivious transfer protocols. The paper presents lower bounds on the resources required to implement such protocols, some impossibility results for one-round schemes, and new constructions which are optimal with respect to some of the given bounds.