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Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security pp 1357–1358Cite as

Verifiable Secret Sharing

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Related Concepts

Secret Sharing Schemes

Definition

A basic secret sharing scheme is defined to resist passive attacks only, which means that its security depends on the assumption that all parties involved run the protocols as prescribed by the scheme. After taking part in the distribution protocol, a nonqualified set of participants is not able to deduce (part of) the secret from their shares.

In many applications, however, a secret sharing scheme is also required to withstand active attacks. This is accomplished by verifiable secret sharing (VSS) schemes, as first introduced in 1985 [3]. Specifically, a VSS scheme is required to withstand the following two types of active attacks:

  • A dealer sending inconsistent or incorrect shares to some of the participants during the distribution protocol

  • Participants submitting incorrect shares during the reconstruction protocol

Theory

Clearly, Shamir’s threshold scheme is not a VSS scheme, since it does not exclude either of these attacks.

A...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Ben-Or M, Goldwasser S, Wigderson A (1988) Completeness theorems for noncryptographic fault-tolerant distributed computation. In: Proceedings of 20th symposium on theory of computing (STOC’88). ACM Press, New York, pp 1–10

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  4. Feldman P (1987) A practical scheme for non-interactive verifiable secret sharing. In: Proceedings of 28th IEEE symposium on foundations of computer science (FOCS’87). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, pp 427–437

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Den Dolech 2, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Berry Schoenmakers (Professor)

Authors
  1. Berry Schoenmakers
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Henk C. A. van Tilborg

  2. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4422, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

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Schoenmakers, B. (2011). Verifiable Secret Sharing. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_14

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