Verifiable secret sharing

About: Verifiable secret sharing is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4241 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99569 citations.

Visual secret sharing for general access structures by random grids

Abstract: Visual secret sharing (VSS) is a way to protect a secret image among a group of participants by using the notions of perfect ciphers and secret sharing. However, each share generated by conventional VSS is m times as big as the original secret image, where m is called pixel expansion. Random grid (RG) is an alternative approach to implement VSS without pixel expansion. However, reported RG-based VSS methods are threshold schemes. In this study, RG-based VSS for general access structures is presented. Secret image is encoded into n RGs while qualified sets can recover the secret visually and forbidden sets cannot. The proposed scheme is a generalisation of the threshold methods, where those reported RG-based schemes can be considered as the special cases of the proposed scheme. Experimental results are provided, demonstrating the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed scheme.

Quantum Secret Sharing Using GHZ-Like State

Abstract: This paper presents a simple and novel quantum secret sharing scheme using GHZ-like state. The characteristics of the GHZ-like state are used to develop the quantum secret sharing scheme. In contrast with the other GHZ-based QSS protocols with the same assumptions, the proposed protocol provides the best quantum bit efficiency.

A Peered Bulletin Board for Robust Use in Verifiable Voting Systems

Abstract: The Web Bulletin Board (WBB) is a key component of verifiable election systems. It is used in the context of election verification to publish evidence of voting and tallying that voters and officials can check, and where challenges can be launched in the event of malfeasance. In practice, the election authority has responsibility for implementing the web bulletin board correctly and reliably, and will wish to ensure that it behaves correctly even in the presence of failures and attacks. To ensure robustness, an implementation will typically use a number of peers to be able to provide a correct service even when some peers go down or behave dishonestly. In this paper we propose a new protocol to implement such a Web Bulletin Board, motivated by the needs of the vVote verifiable voting system. Using a distributed algorithm increases the complexity of the protocol and requires careful reasoning in order to establish correctness. Here we use the Event-B modelling and refinement approach to establish correctness of the peered design against an idealised specification of the bulletin board behaviour. In particular we show that for n peers, a threshold of t > 2n/3 peers behaving correctly is sufficient to ensure correct behaviour of the bulletin board distributed design. The algorithm also behaves correctly even if honest or dishonest peers temporarily drop out of the protocol and then return. The verification approach also establishes that the protocols used within the bulletin board do not interfere with each other. This is the first time a peered web bulletin board suite of protocols has been formally verified.

A Smart Contract System for Decentralized Borda Count Voting

Abstract: In this article, we propose the first self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol for a ranked-choice voting system based on Borda count. Our protocol does not need any trusted setup or tallying authority to compute the tally. The voters interact through a publicly accessible bulletin board for executing the protocol in a way that is publicly verifiable. Our main protocol consists of two rounds. In the first round, the voters publish their public keys, and in the second round they publish their randomized ballots. All voters provide Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs to show that they have been following the protocol specification honestly without revealing their secret votes. At the end of the election, anyone including a third-party observer will be able to compute the tally without needing any tallying authority. We provide security proofs to show that our protocol guarantees the maximum privacy for each voter. We have implemented our protocol using Ethereum's blockchain as a public bulletin board to record voting operations as publicly verifiable transactions. The experimental data obtained from our tests show the protocol's potential for the real-world deployment.

Almost optimum secret sharing schemes secure against cheating for arbitrary secret distribution

Abstract: We consider the problem of cheating in secret sharing schemes, cheating in which individuals submit forged shares in the secret reconstruction phase in an effort to make another participant reconstruct an invalid secret. We introduce a novel technique which uses universal hash functions to detect such cheating and propose two efficient secret sharing schemes that employ the functions. The first scheme is nearly optimum with respect to the size of shares; that is, the size of shares is only one bit longer than its existing lower bound. The second scheme possesses a particular merit in that the parameter for the probability of successful cheating can be chosen without regard to the size of the secret. Further, the proposed schemes are proven to be secure regardless of the probability distribution of the secret.