7 research outputs found
A geometric protocol for cryptography with cards
In the generalized Russian cards problem, the three players Alice, Bob and
Cath draw a,b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of a+b+c cards. Players
only know their own cards and what the deck of cards is. Alice and Bob are then
required to communicate their hand of cards to each other by way of public
messages. The communication is said to be safe if Cath does not learn the
ownership of any specific card; in this paper we consider a strengthened notion
of safety introduced by Swanson and Stinson which we call k-safety.
An elegant solution by Atkinson views the cards as points in a finite
projective plane. We propose a general solution in the spirit of Atkinson's,
although based on finite vector spaces rather than projective planes, and call
it the `geometric protocol'. Given arbitrary c,k>0, this protocol gives an
informative and k-safe solution to the generalized Russian cards problem for
infinitely many values of (a,b,c) with b=O(ac). This improves on the collection
of parameters for which solutions are known. In particular, it is the first
solution which guarantees -safety when Cath has more than one card
Perfectly secure data aggregation via shifted projections
We study a general scenario where confidential information is distributed
among a group of agents who wish to share it in such a way that the data
becomes common knowledge among them but an eavesdropper intercepting their
communications would be unable to obtain any of said data. The information is
modelled as a deck of cards dealt among the agents, so that after the
information is exchanged, all of the communicating agents must know the entire
deal, but the eavesdropper must remain ignorant about who holds each card.
Valentin Goranko and the author previously set up this scenario as the secure
aggregation of distributed information problem and constructed weakly safe
protocols, where given any card , the eavesdropper does not know with
certainty which agent holds . Here we present a perfectly safe protocol,
which does not alter the eavesdropper's perceived probability that any given
agent holds . In our protocol, one of the communicating agents holds a
larger portion of the cards than the rest, but we show how for infinitely many
values of , the number of cards may be chosen so that each of the agents
holds more than cards and less than
Secure aggregation of distributed information: How a team of agents can safely share secrets in front of a spy
We consider the generic problem of Secure Aggregation of Distributed
Information (SADI), where several agents acting as a team have information
distributed among them, modeled by means of a publicly known deck of cards
distributed among the agents, so that each of them knows only her cards. The
agents have to exchange and aggregate the information about how the cards are
distributed among them by means of public announcements over insecure
communication channels, intercepted by an adversary "eavesdropper", in such a
way that the adversary does not learn who holds any of the cards. We present a
combinatorial construction of protocols that provides a direct solution of a
class of SADI problems and develop a technique of iterated reduction of SADI
problems to smaller ones which are eventually solvable directly. We show that
our methods provide a solution to a large class of SADI problems, including all
SADI problems with sufficiently large size and sufficiently balanced card
distributions