Paper 2026/2477

Secret Sharing from Non-Extractable Randomness

Abstract

Bosley and Dodis (TCC 2007) proved that a class of imperfect randomness sources that suffices for information-theoretic encryption of messages longer than the logarithm of the key length must admit deterministic extraction of nearly uniform bits, and asked whether the same is true of two-out-of-two secret sharing. Aggarwal, Chung, Obremski, and Ribeiro (TCC 2022) gave a positive answer for schemes that are in addition leakage-resilient or non-malleable; the original question remained open. We answer it in the negative. For every $b\ge2$ we construct a class of flat sources on $\{0,1\}^{b+2}$, each of min-entropy at least $b$, together with a perfectly correct and perfectly private two-out-of-two scheme that shares a $b$-bit secret into two $(b+1)$-bit shares using any source in the class, and we show that every deterministic map from $\{0,1\}^{b+2}$ to $\{0,1\}$ is at statistical distance at least $1/6$ from uniform on some source in the class. This implies that sharing a long enough secret does not require extractable randomness. The proof is a short parity argument. The idea of the construction extends to other thresholds: for two-out-of-$n$ and $r$-out-of-$r$ sharing we give perfect schemes with $(b+1)$-bit shares, private for classes of flat sources from which no single bit can be extracted with error below $1/(4n-2)$ and $1/(2(2^r-1))$, respectively.