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 k-safety when Cath has more than one card