Information-theoretically Secure Strong Verifiable Secret Sharing

In a (t,n) secret sharing scheme, a mutually trusted dealer divides a secret into n shares in such a way that any t or more than t shares can reconstruct the secret, but fewer than t shares cannot reconstruct the secret. When there is no mutually trusted dealer, a (n,t,n) secret sharing scheme can be used to set up a (t,n) secret sharing because each shareholder also acts as a dealer to decide a master secret jointly and divide each selected secret for others. A verifiable secret sharing (VSS) allows each shareholder to verify that all shares are t-consistent (i.e. every subset of t of the n shares defines the same secret). In this paper, we show that (t,n)-VSS and (n,t,n)-VSS proposed by Pedersen can only ensure that all shares are t-consistent; but shares may not satisfy the security requirements of secret sharing scheme. Then, we introduce a new notion of strong VSS. A strong VSS scheme can ensure that (a) all shares are t-consistent, and (b) all shares satisfy the security requirements of secret sharing scheme. We propose two simple ways to convert Pedersen’s VSS schemes into strong VSS schemes, which are information-theoretically secure. We also prove that our proposed VSS schemes satisfy the strong verifiable property.