A Cryptographic Moving-Knife Cake-Cutting Protocol

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cryptographic protocol for fair cake-cutting that allows asynchronous execution using secure auctions, enabling fair division in distributed networks like the Internet.

Contribution

It presents a novel asynchronous cryptographic moving-knife protocol that minimizes the number of cuts to the theoretical minimum.

Findings

Protocol achieves fairness asynchronously

Uses secure auction for discrete execution

Number of cuts is minimized to n-1

Abstract

This paper proposes a cake-cutting protocol using cryptography when the cake is a heterogeneous good that is represented by an interval on a real line. Although the Dubins-Spanier moving-knife protocol with one knife achieves simple fairness, all players must execute the protocol synchronously. Thus, the protocol cannot be executed on asynchronous networks such as the Internet. We show that the moving-knife protocol can be executed asynchronously by a discrete protocol using a secure auction protocol. The number of cuts is n-1 where n is the number of players, which is the minimum.