Small Steps in Heuristics for the Russian Cards Problem Protocols

This work presents a couple of algorithmic techniques applied to the Russian Cards Problem. This problem represent an idealized scenario where Dynamic Epistemic Logic [4, 5, 8] plays an important role in secure communications analysis. This logic is in a lower layer below the protocol desing tasks acting as a specification and verification formal tool. This work focusses not on the logical aspects but rather on the protocol design/searching problem. It is important to have present the epistemic formal notions of that logic to fully understand the epistemic functions developed here. Secure protocols found in this card game scenario may be a good starting point for developing some aspects towards unconditional information security. Hill-Climbing and Genetic Algorithms are studied as searching techniques aimed to find optimal announcements that can be part of a secure communication protocol. Some problems as the dimension and complexity of the search space are pointed out.