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
Creative Commons Attribution
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}
}
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