A Novel Approach for Verifiable Secret Sharing by using a One Way Hash Function

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new verifiable secret sharing scheme that employs one-way hash functions and probabilistic homomorphic encryption to ensure fair and verifiable secret distribution and reconstruction, even when participants are dishonest.

Contribution

It presents a novel verifiable secret sharing method that extends verification to both share distribution and reconstruction phases using hash functions and homomorphic encryption.

Findings

Provides verifiability for dealer and shareholders.

Ensures fair secret reconstruction.

Supports verification of the reconstructed secret.

Abstract

Threshold secret sharing schemes do not prevent any malicious behavior of the dealer or shareholders and so we need verifiable secret sharing, to detect and identify the cheaters, to achieve fair reconstruction of a secret. The problem of verifiable secret sharing is to verify the shares distributed by the dealer. A novel approach for verifiable secret sharing is presented in this paper where both the dealer and shareholders are not assumed to be honest. In this paper, we extend the term verifiable secret sharing to verify the shares, distributed by a dealer as well as shares submitted by shareholders for secret reconstruction, and to verify the reconstructed secret. Our proposed scheme uses a one way hash function and probabilistic homomorphic encryption function to provide verifiability and fair reconstruction of a secret.