A New Protocol for Conditional Disclosure of Secrets And Its Applications

Many protocols that are based on homomorphic encryption are private only if a client submits inputs from a limited range $S$. Conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) helps to overcome this restriction. In a CDS protocol for a set $S$, the client obtains server\u27s secret if and only if the client\u27s inputs belong to $S$ and thus the server can guard itself against malformed queries. We extend the existing CDS protocols to work over additively homomorphic cryptosystems for every set from $NP/poly$. The new construction is modular and easy to apply. As an example, we derive a new oblivious transfer protocol with log-squared communication and a millionaire\u27s protocol with logarithmic communication. We also implement private, universally verifiable and robust multi-candidate electronic voting so that all voters only transmit an encryption of their vote. The only hardness assumption in all these protocols is that the underlying public-key cryptosystem is IND-CPA secure and the plaintext order does not have small factors