A fuzzy vault scheme

We describe a simple and novel cryptographic construction that we call a fuzzy vault. Alice may place a secret value /spl kappa/ in a fuzzy vault and "lock" it using an unordered set A of elements from some public universe U. If Bob tries to "unlock" the vault using an unordered set B, he obtains /spl kappa/ only if B is close to A, i.e., only if A and B overlap substantially.