Paper 2018/1138

Leakage-Resilient Secret Sharing

Ashutosh Kumar, Raghu Meka, and Amit Sahai

Abstract

In this work, we consider the natural goal of designing secret sharing schemes that ensure security against a powerful adaptive adversary who may learn some ``leaked'' information about all the shares. We say that a secret sharing scheme is $p$-party leakage-resilient, if the secret remains statistically hidden even after an adversary learns a bounded amount of leakage, where each bit of leakage can depend jointly on the shares of an adaptively chosen subset of $p$ parties. A lot of works have focused on designing secret sharing schemes that handle individual and (mostly) non-adaptive leakage for (some) threshold secret sharing schemes [DP07,DDV10,LL12,ADKO15,GK18,BDIR18]. We give an unconditional compiler that transforms any standard secret sharing scheme with arbitrary access structure into a $p$-party leakage-resilient one for $p$ logarithmic in the number of parties. This yields the first secret sharing schemes secure against adaptive and joint leakage for more than two parties. As a natural extension, we initiate the study of leakage-resilient non-malleable secret sharing} and build such schemes for general access structures. We empower the computationally unbounded adversary to adaptively leak from the shares and then use the leakage to tamper with each of the shares arbitrarily and independently. Leveraging our $p$-party leakage-resilient schemes, we also construct such non-malleable secret sharing schemes: any such tampering either preserves the secret or completely `destroys' it. This improves upon the non-malleable secret sharing scheme of Goyal and Kumar (CRYPTO 2018) where no leakage was permitted. Leakage-resilient non-malleable codes can be seen as 2-out-of-2 schemes satisfying our guarantee and have already found several applications in cryptography [LL12,ADKO15,GKPRS18,GK18,CL18,OPVV18]. Our constructions rely on a clean connection we draw to communication complexity in the well-studied number-on-forehead (NOF) model and rely on functions that have strong communication-complexity lower bounds in the NOF model (in a black-box way). We get efficient $p$-party leakage-resilient schemes for $p$ upto $O(\log n)$ as our share sizes have exponential dependence on $p$. We observe that improving this dependence from $2^{O(p)}$ to $2^{o(p)}$ will lead to progress on longstanding open problems in complexity theory.

Note: Added a section on concurrent work.