Card-based Cryptography with a Standard Deck of Cards, Revisited: Efficient Protocols in the Private Model

Abstract Card-based cryptography is a secure computation protocol realized by using physical cards. There are two models on card-based cryptography: public and private models. We adopt private one that allows players to handle cards privately. While much of the existing works for card-based cryptography use two-colored cards, it is also a vital task to construct an efficient protocol with playing cards. In the public model, 2 n cards are necessary for any n -bit input protocol since at least two cards are required to express a Boolean value. It holds true for both two-colored and playing-card settings. On the other hand, the private model enables us to construct a protocol with fewer than 2 n cards. However, all existing protocols that achieve such properties are only in the two-colored setting. This paper shows that the private model enables us to construct a protocol with fewer than 2 n cards using the playing cards. We first show two-bit input protocols with fewer than four cards for logical operations, AND, OR, and XOR. Furthermore, we show a three-input majority voting protocol using only three cards, which is constructed by combining our AND and OR protocols. Notably, our proposed protocols require no randomness. All operations are deterministic and depend only on players’ private inputs.