Distributed oblivious function evaluation and its applications

This paper is about distributed oblivious function evaluation (DOFE). In this setting one party (Alice) has a functionf(x), and the other party (Bob) with an input α wants to learnf(α) in an oblivious way with the help of a set of servers. What Alice should do is to share her secret functionf(x) among the servers. Bob obtains what he should get by interacting with the servers. This paper proposes the model and security requirements for DOFE and analyzes three distributed oblivious polynomial evaluation protocols presented in the paper. The research is supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 1999035802 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.60273029. Hong-Da Li was born in 1960. He received the Ph.D. degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University in 2001. His current research interests are cryptology and cryptographic protocol. Xiong Yang received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Yan'an University, China, in 1984. He is an associate professor in College of Economy and Trade at South China University of Tropical Agriculture. His research interest is information security. Deng-Guo Feng was born in 1963. He is now a Ph.D. supervisor. His research interests focus on information security. Bao Li was born in 1965. He received the Ph.D. degree in cryptography in 1995 from Xidian University. His research interests include cryptographic protocols and public key cryptosystems.