ChURP: Dynamic-committee proactive secret sharing

Abstract

We introduce CHURP (CHUrn-Robust Proactive secret sharing). CHURP enables secure secret-sharing in dynamicsettings, where the committee of nodes storing a secret changes over time. Designed for blockchains, CHURP has lower communication complexity than previous schemes: O(n) on-chain and O(n2) off-chain in the optimistic case of no node failures. CHURP includes several technical innovations: An efficient new proactivization scheme of independent interest, a technique (using asymmetric bivariate polynomials) for efficiently changing secretsharing thresholds, and a hedge against setup failures in an efficient polynomial commitment scheme. We also introduce a general new technique for inexpensive off-chain communication across the peer-to-peer networks of permissionless blockchains. We formally prove the security of CHURP, report on an implementation, and present performance measurements.