Paper 2020/618

Broadcast Secret-Sharing, Bounds and Applications

Ivan Damgård, Kasper Green Larsen, and Sophia Yakoubov

Abstract

Consider a sender S and a group and of n recipients. S holds a secret message m of length l bits and the goal is to allow S to create a secret sharing of m with privacy threshold t among the recipients, by broadcasting a single message c to the recipients. Our goal is to do this with information theoretic security in a model with a simple form of correlated randomness. Namely, for each subset A of recipients of size q, S may share a secret random bit string with all recipients in A. We call this Broadcast Secret-Sharing (BSS) with parameters l, n, t and q. Our main question is: how large must c be, as a function of the parameters? We show that l(n-t)/q is a lower bound, and we show an upper bound of l((n(t+1))/(q+t)-t), matching the lower bound whenever t = 0, or when q = 1 or n-t. When q = n-t, the size of c is exactly l which is clearly minimal. The protocol demonstrating the upper bound in this case requires S to share a key with every subset of size n-t. We show that this overhead cannot be avoided when c has minimal size. We also show that if access is additionally given to an idealized PRG, the lower bound on ciphertext size becomes (k(n-t)/q)+l-negl(k) (where k is the length of the input to the PRG). The upper bound becomes k((n(t+1))/(q+t)-t)+l. BSS can be applied directly to secret-key threshold encryption. We can also consider a setting where the correlated randomness is generated using computationally secure and non-interactive key exchange, where we assume that each recipient has an (independently generated) public key for this purpose. In this model, any protocol for non-interactive secret sharing becomes an ad hoc threshold encryption (ATE) scheme, which is a threshold encryption scheme with no trusted setup beyond a PKI. Our upper bounds imply new ATE schemes, and our lower bound becomes a lower bound on the ciphertext size in any ATE scheme that uses a key exchange functionality and no other cryptographic primitives.

Note: Updated Feb 2021. New version has stronger bounds and constructions, and frames things in the context of 'broadcast secret sharing'.