Abstract: Jesper Buus Nielsen
The Three-Card Trick or: Why I Love Oblivious Transfer
I will talk about how three cards is all you need to play any card game you can imagine (in fact /any/ game you can imagine). This is just an excuse to get to tell you about so-called Oblivious Transfer (OT), which is one of the pearls of theory from within cryptographic protocol theory. OT is an atom of protocol security, in the sense that it is as simple a protocol problem as you can imagine, yet given access to enough OTs, you can solve any protocol problem securely, no matter how complex it is. At the end of the talk I will briefly describe an ongoing implementation effort between Computer Science at Aarhus University and the Alexandra Institute, where we are building a framework to allow the non-specialist to develop highly secure protocols based on OT theory.
