NAME

Crypt::Dining - The Dining Cryptographers' Protocol

SYNOPSIS

        my $dc = new Crypt::Dining(
                LocalAddr       => '123.45.6.7',
                Peers           => [ '123.45.6.8', ... ],
                        );
        my $answer = $dc->round;
        my $answer = $dc->round("hello");

DESCRIPTION

The dining cryptographers' protocol is documented in Bruce Schneier's book as a kind of "cryptographic ouija board". It works as follows:

A number of cryptographers are dining at a circular table. At the end of the meal, the waiter is summoned and asked for the bill. He replies, "Thank you, sir. The bill has been paid." The cryptographers now have the problem of working out whether someone at the table paid the bill, or whether the NSA has paid it as some sort of veiled threat. The protocol proceeds.

Each cryptographer flips a coin, and shows the result ONLY to the participant on his RIGHT. Each cryptographer then compares his coin with that on his LEFT, and raises his hand if they show different faces. If any participant paid the bill, he "cheats" and does the opposite, that is, he raises his hand if the coins show the same face. Now, the hands are counted. An odd number means that someone at the table paid the bill. An even number means that the NSA paid.

ASSUMPTIONS AND IMPLEMENTATION

At most one person "cheats" at any time, otherwise the message is scrambled. Detecting scrambling is only possible with multi-bit messages containing a checksum.

The comparison operator described above is the XOR operator on single-bit values. If the protocol is performed with multi-bit messages, then the XOR is still used.

WIKIPEDIA DESCRIPTION

The following description is copied from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_cryptographers_protocol> and is redistributed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It is a very slightly different protocol to that implemented here, but the result is the same.

The dining cryptographers protocol is a method of anonymous communication. It offers untraceability of both the sender and the recipient.

The method is as follows: two or more cryptographers arrange themselves around a circular dinner table, with menus hiding the interaction of each pair of adjacent cryptographers from the rest. Each adjacent pair picks a random number in private. Then each cryptographer announces publicly the difference between the number on his right and the number on his left, adding a message if he wants to transmit one. All cryptographers then add up the publicly announced numbers. If the sum is 0, no one sent a message. If the sum is a valid message, one cryptographer transmitted a message. If the sum is invalid, more than one cryptographer tried to transmit a message; they wait a random time and try again.

BUGS

If the send_*() and recv_*() methods are overridden to use TCP sockets with very large messages, deadlock may occur around the ring unless something intelligent is done with select().

COPYRIGHT

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.