Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Intuitively, the access structure is the set of all subsets of participants who can recon-
struct S . If a subset A of participants can reconstruct S , putting their shares together
provides a zero entropy to S , which is expressed by H ( S
0. The secret
sharing scheme is said to be perfect when no subset A of participants which is not in
|
S i ; i
A )
=
can gain any information on S by putting their shares together, which is expressed
by H ( S
H ( S ). This last condition is very similar to the notion of perfect
secrecy which was used for encryption.
|
S i ; i
A )
=
We can now formalize the security result of the Shamir secret sharing scheme.
Theorem 11.2. For any threshold t , the Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme is
perfect, with the access structure which consists of all subsets of at least t participants.
We have already seen how to reconstruct S as long as we have at least t shares. Therefore
the entropy of S is zero given these shares.
We should now prove that for any i 1 ,...,
i t 1 , the distribution of S restricted to val-
ues of S i 1 ,...,
S i t 1 is still uniform. We know (thanks to interpolation) that the function
which maps ( S
,
A 1 ,...,
A t 1 )to( S
,
S i 1 ,...,
S i t 1 ) is one to one. This means that for
any ( s
,
s i 1 ,...,
s i t 1 ), the probability that we have S
=
s and S i j =
s i j simultaneously
is (# K ) t .Nowwehave
Pr[ S i j =
s i j ; j
=
1
,...,
t
1]
=
Pr[ S
=
s
,
S i j =
s i j ; j
=
1
,...,
t
1]
s
(# K ) t + 1
=
and
(# K ) 1
Pr[ S
=
s
|
S i j =
s i j ; j
=
1
,...,
t
1]
=
.
Therefore the distribution of S is still uniform when we fixed S i 1 ,...,
S i t 1 : we gained
no information by having these shares only.
11.2.3
Access Structure of Perfect Secret Sharing Schemes
An interesting question is for which access structure does a perfect secret sharing
scheme exist? We have already seen that it exists for a threshold access structure,
thanks to the Shamir scheme. Obviously, if
is an access structure for which there
exists a perfect secret sharing scheme,
must fulfill the following requirement.
For any A
. (If we can reconstruct
S from the shares of A , we can still do it with more shares in B .)
and any B such that A
B ,wehave B
We call this the monotonicity property.
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