Published: 2021-09-09

Rough Cut: Oblivious Transfer

One of my favourite cryptographic protocols is a process for achieving Oblivious Transfer.

Chou, Tung, and Claudio Orlandi. “The simplest protocol for oblivious transfer.” International Conference on Cryptology and Information Security in Latin America. Springer, Cham, 2015.

I like it because it directly relates the problem to the Diffie Hellman construction, and I think the resulting protocol exchange is very elegant.

I’ve also recently been asked to consider doing more content other than papers and to that end have been experienting with animation and video.

Below is a partial rough cut of an explainer for the Oblivious Transfer protocol. I will be putting together a few more rough cuts over the coming weeks on a few topics and am interested in suggestions and feedback. If you find this interesting, would like to see more or different content then please reach out and let me know.

Note: The above video doesn’t delve into the nitty-grtty details around the kinds of cryptographic assumptions made to make the protocol secure. If, I end up taking the project forward then I expect the videos to be a little longer and to dive a little deeper into those kinds of issues.

Credits

The images of Alice and Bob used in this video are by Marcia Díaz Agudelo