A Secure Poker Protocol that Minimizes the Effect of Player Coalitions

Since Shamir, Rivest and Adleman first stated a solution to the mental poker problem [SRA], many protocols trying to implement a fully secure game have been proposed. Although SRA proved in the two player case that such a solution is not possible from an information theoretic point of view, such solutions might be possible when the players’ computational power is limited. The leakage of partial information, found by Lipton [Li], in the initial SRA protocol was fixed by Goldwasser & Micali [GM1], in the two player case, using probabilistic encryption. Unfortunately this scheme did not extend to a larger number of players. No complete solution to the multi-player version of the problem is yet known. All proposals make special assumptions, like the players’ inability to establish secret communications [Yu]&[BF] or the existence of a trusted third party [FM].