Human perfectly secure message transmission protocols and their applications

Abstract

Perfectly secure message transmission (PSMT) schemes have been studied in the field of cryptography for nearly 20 years. In this paper we introduce a new aspect to PSMT. We consider the case when the hardware/software used by the receiver might be corrupted by the adversary. To address this, we replace the receiver by a human (the dual of this is when the sender is a human). Because of this, any proposed protocols should be computationally efficient for a human to carry out. Additionally, they should be as simple as possible, requiring minimal amount of thought and effort for someone to use them correctly. Taking the above into consideration, we propose two different constructions of such protocols. These have been designed to be secure and to be usable - so as to be easy and accurate when human parties use them. Experiments were carried out with human participants to evaluate what humans can compute. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.