Secure Communication of Local States in Interpreted Systems

Abstract

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.