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Adaptive Garbled Circuits and Garbled RAM from Non-Programmable Random Oracles

Authors Cruz Barnum , David Heath , Vladimir Kolesnikov , Rafail Ostrovsky

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Cryptography
  • Security and privacy → Symmetric cryptography and hash functions
Keywords
  • Adaptive Garbling
  • Garbled RAM
  • Random Oracle Model

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Abstract

Garbled circuit techniques secure in the adaptive setting - where inputs are chosen after a garbled program is sent - are motivated by practice, but they are difficult to achieve. Prior adaptive garbling is either impractically expensive or encrypts the garbled program with the output of a programmable random oracle (PRO). This latter approach introduces a strong model and incurs computational overhead.

We present a simple framework for proving adaptive security of garbling schemes in the non-programmable random oracle (NPRO) model. NPRO is a milder model 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 existing GC techniques, which are proved adaptively secure without modification (and hence incurring no overhead).

As our main application, we construct and prove adaptively secure a garbling scheme for tri-state circuits, a model that captures both Boolean circuits and RAM programs (Heath et al., Crypto 2023). For TSC C, our garbling of C is at most |C|⋅ λ bits long, for security parameter λ. This implies both an adaptively secure garbled Boolean circuit scheme, and an adaptively secure garbled RAM scheme where the garbling of a T-step RAM program has size O(T ⋅ log³ T ⋅ log log T ⋅ λ) bits. 

Our scheme is concretely efficient: its Boolean circuit handling matches the performance of half-gates, and it is adaptively secure from NPRO.

Cite As Get BibTex

Cruz Barnum, David Heath, Vladimir Kolesnikov, and Rafail Ostrovsky. Adaptive Garbled Circuits and Garbled RAM from Non-Programmable Random Oracles. In 7th Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 385, pp. 11:1-11:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITC.2026.11

Author Details

Cruz Barnum
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
David Heath
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Vladimir Kolesnikov
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Rafail Ostrovsky
  • University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA

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