A secure additive protocol for card players

Consider three players Alice, Bob and Cath who hold a, b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of d=a+b+c cards. The cards are all different and players only know their own cards. Suppose Alice and Bob wish to communicate their cards to each other without Cath learning whether Alice or Bob holds a specific card. Considering the cards as consecutive natural numbers 0,1,..., we investigate general conditions for when Alice or Bob can safely announce the sum of the cards they hold modulo an appropriately chosen integer. We demonstrate that this holds whenever a,b>2 and c=1. Because Cath holds a single card, this also implies that Alice and Bob will learn the card deal from the other player's announcement

Combinatorial Solutions Providing Improved Security for the Generalized Russian Cards Problem

We present the first formal mathematical presentation of the generalized Russian cards problem, and provide rigorous security definitions that capture both basic and extended versions of weak and perfect security notions. In the generalized Russian cards problem, three players, Alice, Bob, and Cathy, are dealt a deck of $n$ cards, each given $a$, $b$, and $c$ cards, respectively. The goal is for Alice and Bob to learn each other's hands via public communication, without Cathy learning the fate of any particular card. The basic idea is that Alice announces a set of possible hands she might hold, and Bob, using knowledge of his own hand, should be able to learn Alice's cards from this announcement, but Cathy should not. Using a combinatorial approach, we are able to give a nice characterization of informative strategies (i.e., strategies allowing Bob to learn Alice's hand), having optimal communication complexity, namely the set of possible hands Alice announces must be equivalent to a large set of $t-(n, a, 1)$-designs, where $t=a-c$. We also provide some interesting necessary conditions for certain types of deals to be simultaneously informative and secure. That is, for deals satisfying $c = a-d$ for some $d \geq 2$, where $b \geq d-1$ and the strategy is assumed to satisfy a strong version of security (namely perfect $(d-1)$-security), we show that $a = d+1$ and hence $c=1$. We also give a precise characterization of informative and perfectly $(d-1)$-secure deals of the form $(d+1, b, 1)$ satisfying $b \geq d-1$ involving $d-(n, d+1, 1)$-designs

A secure additive protocol for card players

Abstract Consider three players Alice, Bob and Cath who hold a, b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of d = a + b + c cards. The cards are all different and players only know their own cards. Suppose Alice and Bob wish to communicate their cards to each other without Cath learning whether Alice or Bob holds a specific card. Considering the cards as consecutive natural numbers 0, 1, . . . , we investigate general conditions for when Alice or Bob can safely announce the sum of the cards they hold modulo an appropriately chosen integer. We demonstrate that this holds whenever a, b > 2 and c = 1. Because Cath holds a single card, this also implies that Alice and Bob will learn the card deal from the other player's announcement

Unconditionally Secure Cryptography: Signature Schemes, User-Private Information Retrieval, and the Generalized Russian Cards Problem

We focus on three different types of multi-party cryptographic protocols. The first is in the area of unconditionally secure signature schemes, the goal of which is to provide users the ability to electronically sign documents without the reliance on computational assumptions needed in traditional digital signatures. The second is on cooperative protocols in which users help each other maintain privacy while querying a database, called user-private information retrieval protocols. The third is concerned with the generalized Russian cards problem, in which two card players wish to communicate their hands to each other via public announcements without the third player learning the card deal. The latter two problems have close ties to the field of combinatorial designs, and properly fit within the field of combinatorial cryptography. All of these problems have a common thread, in that they are grounded in the information-theoretically secure or unconditionally secure setting

Secure Communication of Local States in Interpreted Systems

Given an interpreted system, we investigate ways for two agents to communicate secrets by public announcements. For card deals, the problem to keep all of your cards a secret (i) can be distinguished from the problem to keep some of your cards a secret (ii). For (i): we characterize a novel class of protocols consisting of two announcements, for the case where two agents both hold n cards and the third agent a single card; the communicating agents announce the sum of their cards modulo 2n+1. For (ii): we show that the problem to keep at least one of your cards a secret is equivalent to the problem to keep your local state (hand of cards) a secret; we provide a large class of card deals for which exchange of secrets is possible; and we give an example for which there is no protocol of less than three announcements