Eavesdropping games: a graph-theoretic approach to privacy in distributed systems

  • Authors:
  • Matthew Franklin;Zvi Galil;Moti Yung

  • Affiliations:
  • Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA;Columbia Univ., New York, NY;CertCo Inc., New York, NY

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

We initiate a graph-theoretic study of privacy in distributed environments with mobile eavesdroppers ("bugs"). For two privacy tasks—distributed database maintenance and message transmission—a computationally unbounded adversary “plays an eavesdrpping game,” coordinating the moment of the bugs among the sites to learn the current memory contents. Many different adversaries are considered, motivated by differences in eavesdropping technologies. We characterize the feasibility of the two privacy tasks combinatorially, construct protocols for the feasible cases, and analyze their computational complexity.