How to Recover a Secret with O(n) Additions

Threshold cryptography is typically based on the idea of secret-sharing a private-key $$s\in F$$ “in the exponent” of some cryptographic group G, or more generally, encoding s in some linearly homomorphic domain. In each invocation of the threshold system (e.g., for signing or decrypting) an “encoding” of the secret is being recovered and so the complexity, measured as the number of group multiplications over G, is equal to the number of F-additions that are needed to reconstruct the secret. Motivated by this scenario, we initiate the study of n-party secret-sharing schemes whose reconstruction algorithm makes a minimal number of additions. The complexity of existing schemes either scales linearly with $$n\log |F|$$ (e.g., Shamir, CACM’79) or, at least, quadratically with n independently of the size of the domain F (e.g., Cramer-Xing, EUROCRYPT ’20). This leaves open the existence of a secret sharing whose recovery algorithm can be computed by performing only O(n) additions. We resolve the question in the affirmative and present such a near-threshold secret sharing scheme that provides privacy against unauthorized sets of density at most $$\tau _p$$ , and correctness for authorized sets of density at least $$\tau _c$$ , for any given arbitrarily close constants $$\tau _p<\tau _c$$ . Reconstruction can be computed by making at most O(n) additions and, in addition, (1) the share size is constant, (2) the sharing procedure also makes only O(n) additions, and (3) the scheme is a blackbox secret-sharing scheme, i.e., the sharing and reconstruction algorithms work universally for all finite abelian groups F. Prior to our work, no such scheme was known even without features (1)–(3) and even for the ramp setting where $$\tau _p$$ and $$\tau _c$$ are far apart. As a by-product, we derive the first blackbox near-threshold secret-sharing scheme with linear-time sharing. We also present several concrete instantiations of our approach that seem practically efficient (e.g., for threshold discrete-log-based signatures). Our constructions are combinatorial in nature. We combine graph-based erasure codes that support “peeling-based” decoding with a new randomness extraction method that is based on inner-product with a small-integer vector. We also introduce a general concatenation-like transform for secret-sharing schemes that allows us to arbitrarily shrink the privacy-correctness gap with a minor overhead. Our techniques enrich the secret-sharing toolbox and, in the context of blackbox secret sharing, provide a new alternative to existing number-theoretic approaches.