Practical Secret Protection

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In [1], the author discusses the pros and cons of a practical automatic key recovery system. We propose a similar solution to the problem of key protection.

The phrase "Rubber-Hose Cryptography" is used to refer to the direct application of pressure on any individual withholding information so that they might feel the "joy at being given the opportunity to confess their secrets". Strictly speaking, this is an inaccurate term because this method only involves breaking a cipher or recovering a key. The term "Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis" is more applicable. The purpose of this article is to explore the more literal meaning of "Rubber-Hose Cryptography".

Let us consider the standard scenario and our basic method of secure communication: Alice wants to send a secret message to Bob while a third party, Eve, wishes to eavesdrop this message. To implement "Rubber-Hose Cryptography" Alice simply kills Eve and sends the message in clear. Note that this renders the method mentioned by Beynon [1] useless. Even assuming the process is completely automated, and the information is extracted from Alice or Bob, this information will never get back to Eve (assuming some rather definitive properties on the nature of the afterlife). Also, there is no need for a cryptographic key of any kind, or indeed any encryption algorithm at all, which significantly reduces the number of operations required (to 1) and consequently the implementation time. We call our system "Practical Secret Protection", or PSP for short.

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