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IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences

Efficient Card-Based Protocols for Symmetric and Partially Doubly Symmetric Functions

S. Ikeda, Yoshihiro Takahashi, Kazumasa Shinagawa, Koji Nuida

Published Mar 9, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Symmetric functions are an important class of functions that includes many interesting functions. Constructing efficient card-based protocols for symmetric functions is an important research topic in card-based cryptography. In 2020, Ruangwises and Itoh designed a protocol for symmetric functions f : {0, 1}n → R using 2n + 2 cards of a two-colored deck. Whether the number of cards in this protocol could be reduced is an open problem. In this paper, we design protocols for symmetric functions using 2n + 1 cards of a two-colored deck, which solve the above problem affirmatively. We also propose protocols for symmetric functions using 2n cards of a three-colored deck, while the existing 2n-card protocol requires a four-colored deck. By further restricting the class of functions to {0}-partially doubly symmetric functions, we can construct even more efficient protocols. In particular, we construct protocols for {0}-partially doubly symmetric functions using 2n cards of a two-colored deck, while the existing protocol requires 2n + 1 cards.

DOI
10.1587/transfun.2025dmp0025

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Symmetric functions are an important class of functions that includes many interesting functions. Constructing efficient card-based protocols for symmetric functions is an important research topic in card-based cryptography. In 2020, Ruangwises and Itoh designed a protocol for symmetric functions f : {0, 1}n → R using 2n + 2 cards of a two-colored deck. Whether the number of cards in this protocol could be reduced is an open problem. In this paper, we design protocols for symmetric functions using 2n + 1 cards of a two-colored deck, which solve the above problem affirmatively. We also propose protocols for symmetric functions using 2n cards of a three-colored deck, while the existing 2n-card protocol requires a four-colored deck. By further restricting the class of functions to {0}-partially doubly symmetric functions, we can construct even more efficient protocols. In particular, we construct protocols for {0}-partially doubly symmetric functions using 2n cards of a two-colored deck, while the existing protocol requires 2n + 1 cards.
Card-based cryptography is an area involving cryptographic techniques that use a deck of physical cards to implement secure computation. In this paper, we study card-based cryptographic protocols for symmetric functions f: {0, 1}n → R, where R is an arbitrary finite set. Any symmetric Boolean function has the property that its output value is determined only by the sum of input bits, and the class of them includes many interesting functions such as the AND and equality functions. In 2020, Ruangwises and Itoh proposed a protocol which uses 2n + 2 cards to securely compute any symmetric function f: {0, 1}n → R; reducing the number of cards to less than 2n + 2 was left as an open problem. While the Ruangwises–Itoh protocol uses a two-colored deck of cards, this paper considers using three-colored and four-colored decks: to give a partial answer to the open problem, we propose three protocols for symmetric functions using 2n + 1 cards or less. Specifically, we first propose a protocol using 2n + 1 cards from a three-colored deck. We then propose two protocols using 2n cards from a four-colored deck; one is a simpler protocol and the other is a more shuffle-efficient protocol.
In card-based cryptography, which uses a physical deck of cards to realize secure multiparty computations, a one-bit value is usually encoded by a pair of cards. Thus, when performing a secure computation of an n-input Boolean function, a sequence of 2n cards representing n bits is needed for input, and some helping cards are typically added to form a protocol. In 2020, Ruangwises and Itoh constructed a card-based protocol for a symmetric Boolean function with an arbitrary range using two helping cards. (Note that a symmetric Boolean function depends only on the number of 1s in its input). At the same time, they showed that the helping cards can be eliminated if the target function is limited to “doubly symmetric” Boolean functions (also known as symmetric self-anti-dual functions). A doubly symmetric Boolean function satisfies the following for all k: when inputting exactly a number k of 1s, the output is the same as the output when inputting exactly a number n − k of 1s. In this paper, we loosen the restriction on doubly symmetric Boolean functions by fixing k = 0, and construct new protocols which require less than two helping cards for that wider class of symmetric Boolean functions. Specifically, we design a one-helping-card protocol for any n > 4, and helping-card-free protocols for n = 3 and n = 4.
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.
Abstract It is known that secure computation can be done by using a deck of physical cards. This area is called card-based cryptography. Shinagawa et al. (in: Provable security—9th international conference, ProvSec 2015, Kanazawa, Japan, 2015) proposed regular n-sided polygon cards that enable to compute functions over Z/nZ{\mathbb {Z}}/n{\mathbb {Z}}Z/nZ Z / n Z . In particular, they designed efficient protocols for linear functions (e.g. addition and constant multiplication) over Z/nZ{\mathbb {Z}}/n{\mathbb {Z}}Z/nZ Z / n Z . Here, efficiency is measured by the number of cards used in the protocol. In this paper, we propose a new type of cards, dihedral cards, as a natural generalization of regular polygon cards. Based on them, we construct efficient protocols for various interesting functions such as carry of addition, equality, and greater-than, whose efficient construction has not been known before. Beside this, we introduce a new protocol framework that captures a wide class of card types including binary cards, regular polygon cards, dihedral cards, and so on.
Card-based protocols are cryptographic protocols that use a deck of physical cards. In this paper, we deal with card-based protocols using a standard deck of playing cards, which are commonly and commercially available. For finite-runtime committed-format protocols, Mizuki (CANS 2016) proposed an eight-card AND protocol with four random bisection cuts and a six-card COPY protocol with one random bisection cut. In this paper, we propose a partial-open action, which reveals any position of the face of cards, by generalizing the half-open action introduced by Miyahara and Mizuki (IJTCS-FAW 2022). Using the partial-open action, we propose four-card AND protocols with three random cuts, a four-card COPY protocol with three random cuts, and a four-card base conversion protocol with a random cut. We note that, without partial-open actions, these AND and COPY protocols with random cuts only are known to be impossible to construct using four cards. Therefore, the partial-open actions are inherently necessary to obtain our results.
Abstract Card-based cryptography allows us to securely compute arbitrary functions using a deck of physical cards. Its performance is mainly measured by the number of used cards and shuffles, and there is a line of work that aims to reduce either of them. One seminal work is the card-based garbled circuit technique by Shinagawa and Nuida (Discret Appl Math 289:248–261, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dam.2020.10.013 ), which allows the construction of a card-based protocol for any Boolean function with a single shuffle. Their construction requires 2n+24g2n + 24g2n+24g 2 n + 24 g cards for an n-input Boolean function that is represented by g logical gates. In this paper, we reduce the number of cards to 2n+8g2n + 8g2n+8g 2 n + 8 g for arbitrary functions while keeping it working with only one shuffle. In addition, we propose two types of extensions to support numerical encoding and multi-input gates. In the extended scheme, the free-ADD technique, obtained by generalizing the free-XOR technique by Manabe and Shinagawa (Deng J, Kolesnikov V, Schwarzmann AA (eds) CANS 2023, LNCS, vol 14342. Springer, Singapore, pp 232–248, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7563-1-11 ), is available. The free-ADD technique allows our scheme to evaluate any n-input symmetric Boolean function using 2n2+6n+22n^2+6n+22n2+6n+2 2 n 2 + 6 n + 2 cards.