Constructing Locally Leakage-Resilient Linear Secret-Sharing Schemes

Innovative side-channel attacks have repeatedly falsified the assumption that cryptographic implementations are opaque black-boxes. Therefore, it is essential to ensure cryptographic constructions’ security even when information leaks via unforeseen avenues. One such fundamental cryptographic primitive is the secret-sharing schemes, which underlies nearly all threshold cryptography. Our understanding of the leakage-resilience of secret-sharing schemes is still in its preliminary stage. This work studies locally leakage-resilient linear secret-sharing schemes. An adversary can leak m bits of arbitrary local leakage from each n secret shares. However, in a locally leakage-resilient secret-sharing scheme, the leakage’s joint distribution reveals no additional information about the secret. For every constant m, we prove that the Massey secret-sharing scheme corresponding to a random linear code of dimension k (over sufficiently large prime fields) is locally leakage-resilient, where k/ n> 1 / 2 is a constant. The previous best construction by Benhamouda, Degwekar, Ishai, Rabin (CRYPTO–2018) needed k/ n> 0.907. A technical challenge arises because the number of all possible m-bit local leakage functions is exponentially larger than the number of random linear codes. Our technical innovation begins with identifying an appropriate pseudorandomness-inspired family of tests; passing them suffices to ensure leakage-resilience. We show that most linear codes pass all tests in this family. This Monte-Carlo construction of linear secret-sharing scheme that is locally leakage-resilient has applications to leakage-resilient secure computation. Furthermore, we highlight a crucial bottleneck for all the analytical approaches in this line of work. Benhamouda et al. introduced an analytical proxy to study the leakage-resilience of secret-sharing schemes; if the proxy is small, then the scheme is leakage-resilient. However, we present a one-bit local leakage function demonstrating that the converse is false, motivating the need for new analytically well-behaved functions that capture leakage-resilience more accurately. Technically, the analysis involves probabilistic and combinatorial techniques and (discrete) Fourier analysis. The family of new “tests” capturing local leakage functions, we believe, is of independent and broader interest.