^September October – 2010 ^November

The notion of Generalized Oblivious Transfer (GOT) was introduced by Ishai and Kushilevitz. In a GOT protocol, Alice holds a set $U$ of messages. A decreasing monotone collection of subsets of $U$ defines the retrieval restrictions. Bob is allowed to learn any permissible subset of messages from that collection, but nothing else, while Alice must remain oblivious regarding the selection that Bob made. We propose a simple and efficient GOT protocol that employs secret sharing. We compare it to another secret sharing based solution for that problem that was recently proposed by Shankar, Srinathan and Pandu Rangan. In particular, we show that the access structures that are realized by the two solutions are related through a duality-type relation that we introduce here. We show that there are examples which favor our solution over the second one, while in other examples the contrary holds. Two applications of GOT are considered — priced oblivious transfer, and oblivious evaluation of multivariate polynomials.

We will discuss some management problems that a minimarket manager may encounter. We consider the simplistic situation in which there are two checkout counters, with one of them operating as an express line. As will be explained, managing this extra simple situation is usually problematic. We will then give examples of some favorable circumstances in which the management problem suddenly becomes easy. Some of these examples are surprising to say the least and involve some of the greatest achievements of human intelect. No prior minimarket work experience is assumed.