How Does Oscar Investigate Mallory — Without Peggy Finding Out He Is A Suspect?
The other day I was asked by a media correspondent, “What got you into things like cryptography and blockchain?”, and I explained that it all started with an amazing PhD student — Dr Zbigniew Kwecka — and who implemented Oblivious Transfer (OT) to preserve the privacy of an investigation. At the time, he used the RSA public key method, so let’s bring it up-to-date and into the current world of elliptic curves and crypto pairing methods.
Oscar suspects Mallory of committing a crime, and now needs to contact his employer — Peggy — to get some key evidence (his age). So how can Oscar do this, without revealing to Peggy that Mallory is a suspect? Well, one way is to define an oblivious transfer (OT) method, and where Oscar gets the required information, without revealing the Mallory is the target. Let’s say that Oscar wants the age of Mallory for their evidence gathering. First Oscar creates a list of identifiers which are employees in the company and , and which also includes Mallory:
1: Bob
2: Alice
3: Trent
4: Carol
5: Heidi
6: Dave
7: Mallory *
