Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/124

On Securing Communication From Profilers

Sandra Diaz-Santiago and Debrup Chakraborty

Abstract: A profiling adversary is an adversary which aims to classify messages into pre-defined profiles and thus gain useful information regarding the sender or receiver of such messages. Usual chosen-plaintext secure encryption schemes are capable of securing information from profilers, but these schemes provide more security than required for this purpose. In this paper we study the requirements for an encryption algorithm to be secure only against profilers and finally give a precise notion of security for such schemes. We also present a full protocol for secure (against profiling adversaries) communication, which neither requires a key exchange nor a public key infrastructure. Our protocol guarantees security against non-human profilers and is constructed using CAPTCHAs and secret sharing schemes.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Data encryption, Profiling adversary, CAPTCHA, Secret sharing

Date: received 6 Mar 2012

Contact author: sdiaz at computacion cs cinvestav mx

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Version: 20120313:213027 (All versions of this report)

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