International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We introduce two new schemes for securely computing Hamming distance in the two-party setting. Our first scheme is a very efficient protocol, based solely on 1-out-of-2 Oblivious Transfer, that achieves full security in the semi-honest setting and one-sided security in the malicious setting. Moreover we show that this protocol is significantly more efficient than the previous proposals, that are either based on garbled circuits or on homomorphic encryption. Our second scheme achieves full security against malicious adversaries and is based on Committed Oblivious Transfer. These protocols have direct applications to secure biometric identification.