How to Recover a Secret with O(n) Additions

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Abstract

Threshold cryptography is typically based on the idea of secret-sharing a private-key s∈ F “in the exponent” of some cryptographic group G, or more generally, encoding s in some linearly homomorphic domain. In each invocation of the threshold system (e.g., for signing or decrypting) an “encoding” of the secret is being recovered and so the complexity, measured as the number of group multiplications over G, is equal to the number of F-additions that are needed to reconstruct the secret. Motivated by this scenario, we initiate the study of n-party secret-sharing schemes whose reconstruction algorithm makes a minimal number of additions. The complexity of existing schemes either scales linearly with nlog | F| (e.g., Shamir, CACM’79) or, at least, quadratically with n independently of the size of the domain F (e.g., Cramer-Xing, EUROCRYPT ’20). This leaves open the existence of a secret sharing whose recovery algorithm can be computed by performing only O(n) additions. We resolve the question in the affirmative and present such a near-threshold secret sharing scheme that provides privacy against unauthorized sets of density at most τp, and correctness for authorized sets of density at least τc, for any given arbitrarily close constants τp< τc. Reconstruction can be computed by making at most O(n) additions and, in addition, (1) the share size is constant, (2) the sharing procedure also makes only O(n) additions, and (3) the scheme is a blackbox secret-sharing scheme, i.e., the sharing and reconstruction algorithms work universally for all finite abelian groups F. Prior to our work, no such scheme was known even without features (1)–(3) and even for the ramp setting where τp and τc are far apart. As a by-product, we derive the first blackbox near-threshold secret-sharing scheme with linear-time sharing. We also present several concrete instantiations of our approach that seem practically efficient (e.g., for threshold discrete-log-based signatures). Our constructions are combinatorial in nature. We combine graph-based erasure codes that support “peeling-based” decoding with a new randomness extraction method that is based on inner-product with a small-integer vector. We also introduce a general concatenation-like transform for secret-sharing schemes that allows us to arbitrarily shrink the privacy-correctness gap with a minor overhead. Our techniques enrich the secret-sharing toolbox and, in the context of blackbox secret sharing, provide a new alternative to existing number-theoretic approaches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2023 - 43rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2023, Proceedings
EditorsHelena Handschuh, Anna Lysyanskaya
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages236-262
Number of pages27
ISBN (Print)9783031385568
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
EventAdvances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2023 - 43rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2023, Proceedings - Santa Barbara, United States
Duration: 20 Aug 202324 Aug 2023

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14081 LNCS

Conference

ConferenceAdvances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2023 - 43rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2023, Proceedings
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara
Period20/08/2324/08/23

Keywords

  • Blackbox secret sharing
  • Secret Sharing
  • Threshold Cryptography

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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