Abstract : Protocols are developed and analyzed for transmitting a secret bit between a sender and a receiver process using only the information contained in a random deal of hands of specified sizes from a deck of n distinct cards. The sender's and receiver's algorithms are known i advance, and all conversation between sender and receiver is public and is heard by all. A correct protocol always succeeds in transmitting the secret bit, and the other player(s), who receive the remaining cards and are assumed to have unlimited computing power, gain no information whatsoever about the value of the secret bit. In other words, their probability of correctly guessing the secret is bit exactly the same after listening to a run of the protocol as it was before. Both randomized and deterministic protocols are considered. A randomized protocol is described which works whenever the sender's and receiver's hands comprise a constant fraction of the deck, for all sufficiently large decks. A deterministic protocol is also described, but it requires the sender and receiver to each have approximately 44% of the cards. A general condition is presented that provides a lower bound on sizes of the sender's and receiver's hands in order for a protocol to exist. There is still a considerable gap between the upper and lower bounds, and improving the bounds remains an open problem. (kr)
The multiparty secret key exchange problem is to find a k-player protocol for generating an n-bit random key. At the end of the protocol, the key should be known to each player but remain completely secret from a computationally unlimited eavesdropper, Eve, who overhears all communication among the players. The players are initially dealt hands of cards of prespecified sizes from a deck of distinct cards; any remaining cards are given to Eve. Considered here is the case in which each player receives the same fraction fi of the cards in the deck, for fi in the interval (0; 1=k]. The efficiency of a secret key exchange protocol is measured by the smallest deck size d 0 for which the protocol is guaranteed of success. A secret key exchange protocol is presented with d 0 = O(n(1=fi) 2:71 ). The best previous bound, by Fischer, Paterson, and Rackoff (1991), was super-polynomial in 1=fi and only handled the special case of k = 2 and n = 1. 1 Introduction The problem of multiparty secret ...
In unconditionally secure protocols, a sender and receiver are able to communicate their secrets to each other without the eavesdropper(s) being able to learn the secret, even when the eavesdropper intercepts the entire communication. We investigate such protocols for the special case of deals of cards over players, where two players aim to communicate to each other their hand of cards without the remaining player(s) learning a single card from either hand. In this contribution we show that a particular protocol of length strictly larger than two (i.e., consisting of more than just one announcement by one player, and one other announcement by the other player) is after all not acceptable, and therefore does not constitute a new solution. The demonstration requires a detailed case-based analysis. The result may bring a general approach to arbitrary finite-length protocols closer.
In the research area of card-based secure computation, one of the long-standing open problems is a problem proposed by Crépeau and Kilian at CRYPTO 1993. This is to develop an efficient protocol using a deck of physical cards that generates uniformly at random a permutation with no fixed points (called a derangement), where the resulting permutation must be secret against the parties in the protocol. All the existing protocols for the problem have a common issue of lacking a guarantee to halt within a finite number of steps. In this paper, we investigate feasibility and infeasibility for the problem where both a uniformly random output and a finite runtime is required. First, we propose a way of reducing the original problem, which is to sample a uniform distribution over an inefficiently large set of the derangements, to another problem of sampling a non-uniform distribution but with a significantly smaller underlying set. This result will be a base of a new approach to the problem. On the other hand, we also give (assuming the abc conjecture), under a certain formal model, an asymptotic lower bound of the number of cards for protocols solving the problem using uniform shuffles only. This result would give a supporting evidence for the necessity of dealing with non-uniform distributions such as in the aforementioned first part of our result.
Abstract Card-based cryptography is a secure computation protocol realized by using physical cards. There are two models on card-based cryptography: public and private models. We adopt private one that allows players to handle cards privately. While much of the existing works for card-based cryptography use two-colored cards, it is also a vital task to construct an efficient protocol with playing cards. In the public model, 2n cards are necessary for any n-bit input protocol since at least two cards are required to express a Boolean value. It holds true for both two-colored and playing-card settings. On the other hand, the private model enables us to construct a protocol with fewer than 2n cards. However, all existing protocols that achieve such properties are only in the two-colored setting. This paper shows that the private model enables us to construct a protocol with fewer than 2n cards using the playing cards. We first show two-bit input protocols with fewer than four cards for logical operations, AND, OR, and XOR. Furthermore, we show a three-input majority voting protocol using only three cards, which is constructed by combining our AND and OR protocols. Notably, our proposed protocols require no randomness. All operations are deterministic and depend only on players’ private inputs.
The problem of
A privately transmitting information to
B by a public announcement overheard by an eavesdropper
C is considered. To do so by a deterministic protocol, their inputs must be correlated. Dependent inputs are represented using a deck of cards. There is a publicly known signature
(a,b,c), where
n=a+b+c+r, and
A gets
a cards,
B gets
b cards, and
C gets
c cards, out of the deck of
n cards. Using a deterministic protocol,
A decides its announcement based on her hand. Using techniques from coding theory, Johnson graphs, and additive number theory, a novel perspective inspired by distributed computing theory is provided, to analyze the amount of information that
A needs to send, while preventing
C from learning a single card of her hand. In one extreme, the generalized Russian cards problem,
B wants to learn all of
A's cards, and in the other,
B wishes to learn something about
A's hand.