Permutable Cut-and-Choose Oblivious Transfer and Its Application

Oblivious transfer (OT) is a significant primitive with wide use in secure two-party computation, private set intersection private and other cryptographic schemes. In the past ten years, different variants of OT primitive like cut-and-choose OT (CCOT) and outsourced OT (OOT), have been proposed so as to satisfy various emerging models. In this paper, we firstly propose and formalize a new primitive called permutable cut-and-choose OT (PCCOT) which generalizes the original CCOT functionality. Furthermore, we construct an efficient PCCOT protocol in the presence of malicious adversaries using the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) hard assumption. It is worth mentioning that we apply the PCCOT primitive to the efficient construction of secure wildcard pattern matching (WPM) protocol. The WPM functionality allows a party to determine the locations of its pattern with wildcard characters occurs in a long text of another party while revealing nothing to either party in addition to the length of their own inputs. Our proposed secure WPM protocol via PCCOT is secure against semi-honest adversary with 2 rounds and has identical communication cost as the the state-of-the-art scheme.