Practical quantum oblivious transfer with a single photon

Abstract

Quantum oblivious transfer (QOT) is an essential cryptographic primitive. But unconditionally secure QOT is known to be impossible. Here we propose a practical QOT protocol, which is perfectly secure against dishonest sender without relying on any technological assumption. Meanwhile, it is also secure against dishonest receiver in the absence of long-term quantum memory and complicated collective measurements. The protocol is extremely feasible, as it can be implemented using currently available Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and no quantum memory, collective measurements nor entanglement are needed for honest participants. More importantly, comparing with other practical QOT schemes, our protocol has an unbeatable efficiency since it requires the transmission of a single photon only.