Paper 2015/576
The Carnac protocol -- or how to read the contents of a sealed envelope
Michael Scott and Brian Spector
Abstract
Johnny Carson as long time host of the Tonight show often appeared in the spoof role of Carnac the Magnificent, a mentalist who could magically read the contents of a sealed envelope. This is in fact a well known stock-in-trade trick of the mentalist's craft, known as ``billet reading''. Here we propose a cryptographic solution to the problem of billet reading, apparently allowing a cipher-text to be decrypted without direct knowledge of the cipher-text, and present both a compelling use case and a practical implementation.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Contact author(s)
- mike scott @ certivox com
- History
- 2015-06-17: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2015/576
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/576,
author = {Michael Scott and Brian Spector},
title = {The Carnac protocol -- or how to read the contents of a sealed envelope},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/576},
year = {2015},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/576}
}
