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Shamir's Threshold Scheme

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Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

In [1], Shamir proposed an elegant “polynomial” construction of a perfect threshold schemes (see threshold cryptography). An (n, k)-threshold scheme is a particular case of secret sharing scheme when any set of k or more participants can recover the secret exactly while any set of less than k particiants gains no additional, i.e. a posteriori, information about the secret. Such threshold schemes are called perfect and they were constructed in [2] and [1]. Shamir's construction is the following.

Assume that the set \(S_{ 0}\) of secrets is some finite field \({GF(q)}\) of q elements (q should be prime power) and that the number of participants of SSS \(n<q.\) The dealer chooses n different nonzero elements (points) \(x_1,\ldots,x_{n}\in GF(q)\), which are publicly known. To distribute a secret \(s_0\) the dealer generates randomly coefficients \(g_1,\ldots,g_{k-1}\in GF(q)\), forms the polynomial \(g(x)=s_0+ g_1x+ \cdots +g_{k-1}x^{k-1}\) of degree less than k and sends to the i-th...

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References

  1. Shamir, A. (1979). “How to share a secret.” Communications of the ACM, 22 (1), 612–613.

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  2. Blakley, R. (1979). “Safeguarding cryptographic keys.” Proceedings of AFIPS 1979 National Computer Conference, 48, 313–317.

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  3. McEliece, R.J. and D.V. Sarwate (1981). “On secret haring and Reed–Solomon codes.” Communications of the ACM, 24, 583–584.

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© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing

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Blakley, R., Kabatiansky, G. (2005). Shamir's Threshold Scheme. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_389

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