English

Perfect Secrecy in the Wild: A Characterization

Theoretical Economics 2025-06-17 v1 Computer Science and Game Theory Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

Alice wishes to reveal the state XX to Bob, if he knows some other information YY also known to her. If Bob does not, she wishes to reveal nothing about XX at all. When can Alice accomplish this? We provide a simple necessary and sufficient condition on the joint distribution of XX and YY. Shannon's result on the perfect secrecy of the one-time pad follows as a special case.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.12416,
  title  = {Perfect Secrecy in the Wild: A Characterization},
  author = {Costas Cavounidis and Massimiliano Furlan and Alkis Georgiadis-Harris},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12416},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:17:34.111Z