Paper 2023/1024 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1024 ↗

Timed Secret Sharing

Alireza Kavousi
Aydin Abadi
Philipp Jovanovic
Abstract

This paper introduces the notion of timed secret sharing (TSS), which establishes lower and upper time bounds for secret reconstruction in a threshold secret sharing scheme. Such time bounds are particularly useful in scenarios where an early or late reconstruction of a secret matters. We propose several new constructions that offer different security properties and show how they can be instantiated efficiently using novel techniques. We highlight how our ideas can be used to break the public goods game, which is an issue inherent to threshold secret sharing-based systems, without relying on incentive mechanism. We achieve this through an upper time bound that can be implemented either via short-lived proofs, or the gradual release of additional shares, establishing a trade-off between time and fault tolerance. The latter independently provides robustness in the event of dropout by some portion of shareholders.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2024-11-06: last updated
2023-07-02: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1024
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1024,
      author = {Alireza Kavousi and Aydin Abadi and Philipp Jovanovic},
      title = {Timed Secret Sharing},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1024},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1024}
}
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