Oblivious Transfer

Oblivious transfer (OT) is a cryptographic protocol enabling one party to receive one of two pieces of data from another party without the sender knowing which piece was received. Current research focuses on improving OT's efficiency and security, particularly through the development of unconditionally secure protocols and novel architectures like those employing secret sharing, homomorphic encryption, and garbled circuits, aiming for faster execution speeds and reduced communication overhead. These advancements are crucial for enhancing the privacy and security of applications such as machine learning, secure multi-party computation, and private data analysis, impacting fields ranging from data science to secure cloud computing.