A Fuzzy Vault Scheme

We describe a simple and novel cryptographic construction that we refer to as a fuzzy vault. A player Alice may place a secret value κ in a fuzzy vault and “lock” it using a set A of elements from some public universe U . If Bob tries to “unlock” the vault using a set B of similar length, he obtains κ only if B is close to A, i.e., only if A and B overlap substantially. In constrast to previous constructions of this flavor, ours possesses the useful feature of order invariance, meaning that the ordering of A and B is immaterial to the functioning of the vault. As we show, our scheme enjoys provable security against a computationally unbounded attacker.