Strengthening the Security of Distributed Oblivious Transfer

We study the distributed oblivious transfer first proposed by Naor and Pinkas in ASIACRYPT 2000, and generalized by Blundo et al. originally in SAC 2002 and Nikov et al. in INDOCRYPT 2002. One major objective of distributed oblivious transfer is to achieve information theoretic security under specified conditions through the distribution of the functions of traditional oblivious transfer to a set of neutral parties. In this paper we revise the definition of distributed oblivious transfer in order to deal with stronger adversaries and clarify possible ambiguities. Under the new definition, we observe some impossibility results and derive the upper bounds for the system parameters (with respect to the size of coalition). The weak points of previously proposed schemes based on threshold secret sharing schemes using polynomial interpolation are reviewed and resolved. We generalize the results and prove that, by adjusting some technical details, a previous scheme proposed by Nikov et al. is unconditionally secure. This protocol is efficient and achieves the parameter bounds at the same time.