A colouring protocol for the generalized Russian cards problem

Abstract

In the generalized Russian cards problem, Alice, Bob and Cath draw a, b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of size a + b + c. Alice and Bob must then communicate their entire hand to each other, without Cath learning the owner of a single card she does not hold. Unlike many traditional problems in cryptography, however, they are not allowed to encode or hide the messages they exchange from Cath. The problem is then to find methods through which they can achieve this. We propose a general four-step solution based on finite vector spaces, and call it the “colouring protocol”, as it involves colourings of lines. Our main results show that the colouring protocol may be used to solve the generalized Russian cards problem in cases where a is a power of a prime, c = O(a2) and b = O(c2). This improves substantially on the set of parameters for which solutions are known to exist; in particular, it had not been shown previously that the problem could be solved in cases where the eavesdropper has more cards than one of the communicating players.