Secret-sharing for NP

Abstract

A computational secret-sharing scheme is a method that enables a dealer, that has a secret, to distribute this secret among a set of parties such that a “qualified” subset of parties can efficiently reconstruct the secret while any “unqualified” subset of parties cannot efficiently learn anything about the secret. The collection of “qualified” subsets is defined by a monotone Boolean function.It has been a major open problem to understand which (monotone) functions can be realized by a computational secret-sharing scheme. Yao suggested a method for secret-sharing for any function that has a polynomial-size monotone circuit (a class which is strictly smaller than the class of monotone functions in P). Around 1990 Rudich raised the possibility of obtaining secret-sharing for all monotone functions in NP: In order to reconstruct the secret a set of parties must be “qualified” and provide a witness attesting to this fact.Recently, Garg et al. [14] put forward the concept of witness encryption, where the goal is to encrypt a message relative to a statement x ∈ L for a language L ∈ NP such that anyone holding a witness to the statement can decrypt the message, however, if x ∉ L, then it is computationally hard to decrypt. Garg et al. showed how to construct several cryptographic primitives from witness encryption and gave a candidate construction.One can show that computational secret-sharing implies witness encryption for the same language. Our main result is the converse: we give a construction of a computational secret-sharing scheme for any monotone function in NP assuming witness encryption for NP and one-way functions. As a consequence we get a completeness theorem for secret- sharing: computational secret-sharing scheme for any single monotone NP-complete function implies a computational secret-sharing scheme for every monotone function in NP.