Weakly-private secret sharing schemes

Amos Beimel, Matthew Franklin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Secret-sharing schemes are an important tool in cryptography that is used in the construction of many secure protocols. However, the shares' size in the best known secret-sharing schemes realizing general access structures is exponential in the number of parties in the access structure, making them impractical. On the other hand, the best lower bound known for sharing of an ℓ-bit secret with respect to an access structure with n parties is Ω(ℓn/log n) (Csirmaz, EUROCRYPT 94). No major progress on closing this gap has been obtained in the last decade. Faced by our lack of understanding of the share complexity of secret sharing schemes, we investigate a weaker notion of privacy in secrets sharing schemes where each unauthorized set can never rule out any secret (rather than not learn any "probabilistic" information on the secret). Such schemes were used previously to prove lower bounds on the shares' size of perfect secret-sharing schemes. Our main results is somewhat surprising upper-bounds on the shares' size in weakly-private schemes. - For every access structure, we construct a scheme for sharing an ℓ-bit secret with (ℓ + c)-bit shares, where c is a constant depending on the access structure (alas, c can be exponential in n). Thus, our schemes become more efficient as ℓ - the secret size - grows. For example, for the above mentioned access structure of Csirmaz, we construct a scheme with shares' size ℓ + n log n. - We construct efficient weakly-private schemes for threshold access structures for sharing a one bit secret. Most impressively, for the 2-out-of-n threshold access structure, we construct a scheme with 2-bit shares (compared to Ω(log n) in any perfect secret sharing scheme).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTheory of Cryptography - 4th Theory of Cryptography Conference, TCC 2007, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages253-272
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)9783540709350
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2007
Event4th Theory of Cryptography Conference, TCC 2OO7 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 21 Feb 200724 Feb 2007

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4392 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference4th Theory of Cryptography Conference, TCC 2OO7
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period21/02/0724/02/07

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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