What a lovely hat

Paper 2024/1032

Threshold OPRF from Threshold Additive HE

Abstract

An oblivious pseudorandom function (OPRF) is a two-party protocol in which a party holds an input and the other party holds the PRF key, such that the party having the input only learns the PRF output and the party having the key would not learn the input. Now, in a threshold oblivious pseudorandom function (TOPRF) protocol, a PRF key K is initially shared among T servers. A client can obtain a PRF value by interacting with t(≤ T) servers but is unable to compute the same with up to (t − 1) servers. In this paper, we present a practically efficient homomorphic encryption (HE)-based post-quantum secure TOPRF protocol. Our proposed approach, which is based on a novel use of threshold HE, is agnostic of the underlying PRF and outperforms existing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)-based approaches for TOPRF computation by several orders of magnitude in terms of running time. The FHE-based approaches require bootstrapping, a computationally extensive operation, and the primary bottleneck for evaluating large-depth circuits. Whereas, our proposed approach is based on a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol that uses a threshold additive HE scheme based on Regev’s cryptosystem (J’ACM 2009) alternative to FHE-based approaches. Concretely, we show a novel replacement of bootstrapping required in traditional FHE schemes by a threshold additive HE-based interactive protocol that performs masked decryption followed by table look-ups, jointly performed by a group of servers holding secret shares of the HE decryption key. Finally, We present a practical validation of our approach by realizing an AES-based TOPRF with an evaluation time of less than 1 second on consumer-grade server(s).