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Human Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Protocols and Their Applications

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Security and Cryptography for Networks (SCN 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7485))

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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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

    Stelios Erotokritou & Yvo Desmedt

  2. Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center, The Cyprus Institute, Cyprus

    Stelios Erotokritou

Authors
  1. Stelios Erotokritou
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  2. Yvo Desmedt
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Salerno, via Ponte don Melillo, 84084, Fisciano, SA, Italy

    Ivan Visconti  & Roberto De Prisco  & 

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Erotokritou, S., Desmedt, Y. (2012). Human Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Protocols and Their Applications. In: Visconti, I., De Prisco, R. (eds) Security and Cryptography for Networks. SCN 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7485. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32928-9_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32928-9_30

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32927-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32928-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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