International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Garbled circuit techniques that are secure in the adaptive setting -- where inputs are chosen after the garbled program is sent -- are motivated by practice, but they are notoriously difficult to achieve. Prior adaptive garbling is either impractically expensive or encrypts the entire garbled program with the output of a programmable random oracle (PRO), a strong assumption.

We present a simple framework for proving adaptive security of garbling schemes in the non-programmable random oracle (NPRO) model. NPRO is a much milder assumption than PRO, and it is close to the assumption required by the widely used Free XOR extension. Our framework is applicable to a number of GC techniques.

As our main goal and as an application of the framework, we construct and prove adaptively secure a garbling scheme for tri-state circuits, a recently proposed circuit model that captures both Boolean circuits and RAM programs (Heath et al., Crypto 2023). For a given TSC $C$, our garbling of $C$ is at most $|C|\cdot \lambda$ bits long, where $\lambda$ is the security parameter. This implies both an adaptively secure garbled Boolean circuit scheme, as well an adaptively secure garbled RAM scheme where the garbling of $T$ steps of a RAM program has size $O(T \cdot \log^3 T \cdot \log \log T \cdot \lambda)$ bits. Our scheme is concretely efficient: its Boolean circuit handling matches the performance of the popular half-gates, and it is adaptively secure from NPRO.