Abuses in Cryptography and How to Fight Them

The following seems quite familiar: “Alice and Bob want to flip a coin by telephone. (They have just divorced, live in different countries, want to decide who will have the children during the next holiday.). . .” So they use [Blu82]’s (or an improved) protocol. However, Alice and Bob’s divorce has been set up to cover up their spying activities. When they use [Blu82]’s protocol, they don’t care if the “coinflip” is random, but they want to abuse the protocol to send secret information to each other. The counter-espionage service, however, doesn’t know that the divorce and the use of the [Blu82]’s protocol are just cover-ups.In this paper, we demonstrate how several modern cryptosystems can be abused. We generalize [Sim83b]’s subliminal channel and [DGB87]’s abuse of the [FFS87, FS86] identification systems and demonstrate how one can prevent abuses of cryptosystems.