Show HN: Proposal for a new 3-pass protocol

github.com

3 points19eightyfour2 comments

For background on 3-pass protocols, see [1]

This could have some holes, so I'm putting it out there to see if anyone can poke some in it, or seeing if it can stand up. It's flexible enough that it can encompass a family of ways of doing this -- but I'll consider it defeated if there's a fundamental flaw with the central idea of using AONTs to confound adversaries attacks. My plan with this is, if it does work out, not to patent it, but just to implement it securely under MIT license.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-pass_protocol

I currently consider this broken since, turns out that XOR and permutation do not commute over each other, and anyway to get them do so so requires knowledge of the secrets to be transmitted in a way to the channel that lets attacks recover them.

The need for XOR can be removed, but then each half of the AONT(message) is exposed. I couldn't see a way around this. So even tho I'm sure there is a way to construct a secret exchange on insecure channel mechanism (probably using 3 pass) I do not see it right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com