On the information ratio of non-perfect secret sharing schemes

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00453-016-0217-9A secret sharing scheme is non-perfect if some subsets of players that cannot recover the secret value have partial information about it. The information ratio of a secret sharing scheme is the ratio between the maximum length of the shares and the length of the secret. This work is dedicated to the search of bounds on the information ratio of non-perfect secret sharing schemes and the construction of efficient linear non-perfect secret sharing schemes. To this end, we extend the known connections between matroids, polymatroids and perfect secret sharing schemes to the non-perfect case. In order to study non-perfect secret sharing schemes in all generality, we describe their structure through their access function, a real function that measures the amount of information on the secret value that is obtained by each subset of players. We prove that there exists a secret sharing scheme for every access function. Uniform access functions, that is, access functions whose values depend only on the number of players, generalize the threshold access structures. The optimal information ratio of the uniform access functions with rational values has been determined by Yoshida, Fujiwara and Fossorier. By using the tools that are described in our work, we provide a much simpler proof of that result and we extend it to access functions with real values.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Blackbox secret sharing revisited: A coding-theoretic approach with application to expansionless near-threshold schemes

A blackbox secret sharing (BBSS) scheme works in exactly the same way for all finite Abelian groups G; it can be instantiated for any such group G and only black-box access to its group operations and to random group elements is required. A secret is a single group element and each of the n players’ shares is a vector of such elements. Share-computation and secret-reconstruction is by integer linear combinations. These do not depend on G, and neither do the privacy and reconstruction parameters t, r. This classical, fundamental primitive was introduced by Desmedt and Frankel (CRYPTO 1989) in their context of “threshold cryptography.” The expansion factor is the total number of group elements in a full sharing divided by n. For threshold BBSS with t-privacy (Formula presented)-reconstruction and arbitrary n, constructions with minimal expansion (Formula presented) exist (CRYPTO 2002, 2005). These results are firmly rooted in number theory; each makes (different) judicious choices of orders in number fields admitting a vector of elements of very large length (in the number field degree) whose corresponding Vandermonde-determinant is sufficiently controlled so as to enable BBSS by a suitable adaptation of Shamir’s scheme. Alternative approaches generally lead to very large expansion. The state of the art of BBSS has not changed for the last 17 years. Our contributions are two-fold. (1) We introduce a novel, nontrivial, effective construction of BBSS based on coding theory instead of number theory. For threshold-BBSS we also achieve minimal expansion factor O(log n).(2) Our method is more versatile. Namely, we show, for the first time, BBSS that is near-threshold, i.e., r-t is an arbitrarily small constant fraction of n, and that has expansion factor O(1), i.e., individual share-vectors of constant length (“asymptotically expansionless”). Threshold can be concentrated essentially freely across full range. We also show expansion is minimal for near-threshold and that such BBSS cannot be attained by previous methods. Our general construction is based on a well-known mathematical principle, the local-global principle. More precisely, we first construct BBSS over local rings through either Reed-Solomon or algebraic geometry codes. We then “glue” these schemes together in a dedicated manner to obtain a global secret sharing scheme, i.e., defined over the integers, which, as we finally prove using novel insights, has the desired BBSS properties. Though our main purpose here is advancing BBSS for its own sake, we also briefly address possible protocol applications