An experimental implementation of oblivious transfer in the noisy storage model

Abstract

Cryptography’s importance in our everyday lives continues to grow in our increasingly digital world. Oblivious transfer has long been a fundamental and important cryptographic primitive, as it is known that general two-party cryptographic tasks can be built from this basic building block. Here we show the experimental implementation of a 1-2 random oblivious transfer protocol by performing measurements on polarization-entangled photon pairs in a modified entangled quantum key distribution system, followed by all of the necessary classical postprocessing including one-way error correction. We successfully exchange a 1,366 bit random oblivious transfer string in ~3 min and include a full security analysis under the noisy storage model, accounting for all experimental error rates and finite size effects. This demonstrates the feasibility of using today’s quantum technologies to implement secure two-party protocols.