Hash function based secret sharing scheme designs

TL;DR

This paper proposes a flexible, efficient secret sharing scheme based on hash functions and herding hashes, capable of handling various access structures and supporting proactive and verifiable features.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hash-based secret sharing scheme that is perfect, ideal, and adaptable to general access structures, enhancing efficiency and flexibility.

Findings

Scheme is perfect and ideal for threshold access

Supports general access structures

Efficient setup and recovery process

Abstract

Secret sharing schemes create an effective method to safeguard a secret by dividing it among several participants. By using hash functions and the herding hashes technique, we first set up a (t+1, n) threshold scheme which is perfect and ideal, and then extend it to schemes for any general access structure. The schemes can be further set up as proactive or verifiable if necessary. The setup and recovery of the secret is efficient due to the fast calculation of the hash function. The proposed scheme is flexible because of the use of existing hash functions.