ISO/IEC 25330-3 Standard on Oblivious Transfer Extension Approved, Led by Ant Group

At the recent ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 plenary meeting in Virginia, the third part of ISO/IEC 25330, titled “Information Security — Oblivious Transfer — Part 3: Oblivious Transfer Extension,” was officially approved as an international standard project.

The standard is driven by Ant Group, with Ant Technology Research Institute cryptography lab researcher Hong Cheng serving as chief editor and senior security expert Zhao Yuan as deputy editor.

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27, the sub‑committee for information security, network security, and privacy protection, is a leading global body whose standards (e.g., the ISO/IEC 27000 series) are widely adopted across finance, government, IoT, and other security‑critical sectors. Its Working Group 2 focuses on cryptography and security mechanisms.

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a cryptographic protocol that lets a receiver obtain selected data from a sender without the sender learning which items were chosen, and it is a core component of secure multi‑party computation. ISO/IEC 25330 aims to provide a unified technical specification for OT, dividing the work into three parts: a general framework, basic OT, and OT extension technology.

The OT extension part, led by Ant Group, addresses the efficiency limitations of basic OT. Under Ant Group’s initiative, the Chinese‑authored “YWL+20” scheme (also known as Ferret, presented at ACM CCS 2020) was incorporated into the standard.

Chief editor Hong Cheng stated that standardizing OT protocols, security requirements, and implementation details will help solve interoperability challenges across the industry and provide a trustworthy technical baseline for privacy‑preserving computation, highlighting China’s innovation in cryptography.

Reference: Kang Yang, Chenkai Weng, Xiao Lan, Jiang Zhang, Xiao Wang. “Ferret: Fast Extension for Correlated OT with Small Communication.” ACM CCS 2020.