How to Stop a Cheater: Secret Sharing with Dishonest Participation

Abstract

At times it is necessary to obtain a group decision from a number of different modes over a large network. Secret sharing protocols allow a quorum q of a group of n people to arrive at decisions by having the quorum recompute a predetermined secret, such as an access code, while preventing less than q people from gaining any information about the secret. However, current protocols 6, 5 are vulnerable when participants cheat, for example by giving false information to other participants. In this work, I present a powerful new protocol which detects cheaters immediately and halts the exchange before any more information is revealed. In addition, it prevents cheaters from gaining any information without revealing an equal amount of their own. This protocol will present new paradigms in a variety of applications, such as electronic balloting and secure file system fault tolerance.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 22, 1993
Accession Number
ADA269012

Entities

People

  • Erik W. Selberg

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Coefficients
  • Commerce
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Equations
  • Fault Tolerance
  • Notation
  • Operating Systems
  • Polynomials
  • Probability
  • Research Facilities
  • Schools
  • Security
  • United States
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Educational Psychology

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics