Oblivious transfer based on quantum state computational distinguishability
This addresses the security vulnerability of classical cryptographic schemes for users in cryptography, offering a quantum-resistant alternative, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing quantum hardness assumptions.
The paper tackles the problem of securing oblivious transfer against quantum attacks by proposing a protocol based on quantum state computational distinguishability, which is feasible and implementable in polynomial time.
Oblivious transfer protocol is a basic building block in cryptography and is used to transfer information from a sender to a receiver in such a way that, at the end of the protocol, the sender does not know if the receiver got the message or not. Since Shor's quantum algorithm appeared, the security of most of classical cryptographic schemes has been compromised, as they rely on the fact that factoring is unfeasible. To overcome this, quantum mechanics has been used intensively in the past decades, and alternatives resistant to quantum attacks have been developed in order to fulfill the (potential) lack of security of a significant number of classical schemes. In this paper, we present a quantum computationally secure protocol for oblivious transfer between two parties, under the assumption of quantum hardness of state distinguishability. The protocol is feasible, in the sense that it is implementable in polynomial time.