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Threshold Cryptography

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Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

Related Concepts

Secret Sharing Schemes; Threshold Signature; Verifiable Secret Sharing; Visual Secret Sharing Schemes

Definition

Techniques to let only groups of people use a cryptographic system, be it to compute or verify digital signatures or to encrypt or decrypt digital data.

Background

In modern cryptography, most schemes have been developed for a scenario with one sender and one receiver. However, there are scenarios in which many receivers (or many senders) need to share the power to use a cryptosystem. The main motivation for threshold cryptography was to develop techniques to deal with the multi-sender/multi-receiver scenarios.

To illustrate the aforementioned scenarios, we first discuss several particular cases of threshold cryptography to clarify its importance. To motivate threshold decryption, take the setting of key escrow  [4, p. 210]. In Micali’s approach [34] as well as the NIST proposal Clipper Chip proposal [7], a threshold scheme is used. Key Escrow agents have...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower street, WC1E 6BT, London, UK

    Yvo Desmedt Dr.

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  1. Yvo Desmedt Dr.
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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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Desmedt, Y. (2011). Threshold Cryptography. 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_330

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