A generic construction to build simple oblivious transfer protocols from homomorphic encryption schemes

Oblivious transfer is a fundamental problem in cryptography where it is required that a sender transfers one of potentially many pieces of information to a receiver and at the same time remains oblivious as to which piece has been transferred. There exist many oblivious transfer protocols in the literature; however, most of them lack efficiency needed in practical situations. To fill this gap, we employ the notion of asymmetric homomorphic encryption and propose a generic construction to build simple and efficient oblivious transfer protocols. We then instantiate our construction with some well-known homomorphic encryption schemes such as RSA, Paillier and NTRU to obtain concrete oblivious transfer protocols. We further prove that our generic construction is secure in the universal composable framework.