Cryptographic Protocol for Comparing Sets without Leaking Them: Applications in Astronomy

Details Cryptographic Protocol for Comparing Sets without Leaking Them: Applications in Astronomy Cryptographic Protocol for Comparing Sets without Leaking Them: Applications in Astronomy

Sep 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011ess.....2.4407m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, ESS meeting #2, #44.07

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Scientific paper

We describe a cryptographic protocol for two or more persons to compare individual lists of astronomical objects of interest without leaking them. Cryptographers have long known such protocols; astronomers and other scientists may benefit from them also. We describe some latent opportunities that would be enabled by this protocol. Consider the following scenario: Alice has a set of stars that are candidate hosts of transiting planets. Bob has a similar set. Alice and Bob have a mutual desire to know the intersection of their two lists without revealing them to each other. Alice and Bob can recruit a trusted third party, Josephine, to make the comparison, report the results, and then destroy each list. Limitations of that approach are that 1) Josephine must devote time to make each comparison, 2) Alice and Bob may not know a Josephine that they both can trust, especially if Alice and Bob are from different communities, 3) Josephine may not indeed be trustworthy, 4) a fourth person may wittingly or unwittingly intercept one or both of the lists in Josephine's care, and 5) anticipating those limitations, Alice and Bob may elect not to recruit a Josephine and hence not compare their lists. We describe a variant that overcomes those limitations by A) encrypting the lists prior to transmitting them to Josephine, and B) replacing a human Josephine with a computer website.

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