Fair exchange of secrets

  • Authors:
  • Tom Tedrick

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of CRYPTO 84 on Advances in cryptology
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

We consider two problems which arose in the context of "The Exchange of Secret Keys" (see [1]).(1). In the original protocol, one party may halt the exchange and have a 2 to 1 expected time advantage in computing the other party's secret. To solve this problem, when there is a particular point in the exchange where this time advantage may be critical, we presented at CRYPTO 83 (see [5]), a method for exchanging "fractions" of a single bit.In this paper we extend the method so as to apply it to all bits to be exchanged, and show how it can be used in a more abstract setting (as in [2]).(2). We also present a solution to the problem of how to ensure a fair exchange of secrets when one party in the exchange is "risk seeking", while the other is "risk-adverse".