English

How not to share a set of secrets

Cryptography and Security 2010-09-16 v3

Abstract

This note analyses one of the existing space efficient secret sharing schemes and suggests vulnerabilities in its design. We observe that the said algorithm fails for certain choices of the set of secrets and there is no reason for preferring this particular scheme over alternative schemes. The paper also elaborates the adoption of a scheme proposed by Hugo Krawczyk as an extension of Shamir's scheme, for a set of secrets. Such an implementation is space optimal and works for all choices of secrets. We also propose two new methods of attack which are valid under certain assumptions and observe that it is the elimination of random values that facilitates these kinds of attacks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1001.1877,
  title  = {How not to share a set of secrets},
  author = {K. R. Sahasranand and Nithin Nagaraj and S. Rajan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.1877},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

Added a new section demonstrating two new kinds of attack; 10 pages