Generalized oblivious transfer by secret sharing (Q629875)

Generalized Oblivious Transfer (GOT) was introduced by \textit{Y. Ishai} and \textit{E. Kushilevitz} [``Private simultaneous messages protocols with applications'', in: Proc. 5th Israel symposium on theory of computing and systems, ISTCS97. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society. 174--184 (1997)]. A set of messages \(U\) and a decreasing monotone collection of ``permissible'' subsets is given, i.e., every subset of a permissible set is also permissible. The objective is to allow to choose any of the subsets by one party without taking knowledge of the other subsets and leaving the other party oblivious about the choice. The author constructs a monotone increasing access structure from the collection of permissible sets for a secret-sharing scheme. In combination with a \(k\)-out-of-\(n\)-OT he obtains his GOT-protocol. The author compares his scheme with another GOT-protocol recently introduced in [\textit{B. Shankar, K. Srinathan} and \textit{C. P. Rangan}, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 4904, 304--309 (2008; Zbl 1131.68336)]. The author shows a duality relation between his access structure and the one used by Shankar et al. Finally, he considers two applications, namely priced-OT and oblivious multivariate polynomial evaluation. Two concrete examples show that in some cases his access structure is ideal whereas in others the access structure of Shankar is ideal.