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International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science

AN EFFICIENT AND INFORMATION THEORETICALLY SECURE RATIONAL SECRET SHARING SCHEME BASED ON SYMMETRIC BIVARIATE POLYNOMIALS

Christophe Tartary, Huaxiong Wang, Yun Zhang

Published Sep 1, 2011• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The design of rational cryptographic protocols is a recently created research area at the intersection of cryptography and game theory. In this paper, we propose a new m-out-of-n rational secret sharing scheme requiring neither the involvement of the dealer (except during the initial share distribution) nor a trusted mediator. Our protocol leads to a Nash equilibrium surviving the iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies for m ≥ 4. Our construction is information theoretically secure and it is immune against backward induction attacks. Contrary to Kol and Naor who used a specific cryptographic primitive in their TCC'08 paper (namely, meaningful/meaningless encryption), the immunity of our scheme is based on the use of bivariate polynomials and one-time pads. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that such polynomials have been used for rational secret sharing. Our scheme is efficient and does not require any physical assumptions such as envelopes or ballot boxes. As most of existing rational protocols, our construction requires simultaneous broadcast channels. However, our proposed scheme does not require any computational assumption and it provides information theoretical security.

DOI
10.1142/s0129054111008775

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•Jan 1, 2014•1 citation
The design of rational cryptographic protocols is a recently created research area at the intersection of cryptography and game theory. In this paper, we propose a new m-out-of-n rational secret sharing scheme requiring neither the involvement of the dealer (except during the initial share distribution) nor a trusted mediator. Our protocol leads to a Nash equilibrium surviving the iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies for m ≥ 4. Our construction is information theoretically secure and it is immune against backward induction attacks. Contrary to Kol and Naor who used a specific cryptographic primitive in their TCC'08 paper (namely, meaningful/meaningless encryption), the immunity of our scheme is based on the use of bivariate polynomials and one-time pads. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that such polynomials have been used for rational secret sharing. Our scheme is efficient and does not require any physical assumptions such as envelopes or ballot boxes. As most of existing rational protocols, our construction requires simultaneous broadcast channels. However, our proposed scheme does not require any computational assumption and it provides information theoretical security.
Most rational secret sharing protocols aim to achieve a more appealing equilibrium or resist adversaries. However, all previous protocols achieve resilience against irrational adversaries at the cost of inducing a weak guarantee of Nash equilibrium surviving iterated deletion, which has been proved weaker than strict Nash equilibrium. Moreover, they achieve equilibrium in a computational way based on the computational limitations of adversaries. In this paper, we design two unconditionally secure rational (t, n) secret sharing protocols. Contrary to prior works, our protocols induce an enhanced notion of strict equilibrium with respect to adversary structure A, and resist the computationally unbounded and adaptive adversary without using cryptographic primitives. Our protocols achieve stronger stability, since rational players have an incentive not to deviate no matter how the adversary behaves, and they are immune to the backward induction. Our protocols are secure against the adversary corrupting less than [n/3] players and the adversary corrupting less than [n/2]-1 players respectively. Both of them achieve utility independence.
We consider the problem of rational secret sharing introduced by Halpern and Teague [1], where the players involved in secret sharing play only if it is to their advantage.This can be characterized in the form of preferences.Players would prefer to get the secret than to not get it and secondly with lesser preference, they would like as few other players to get the secret as possible.Several positive results have already been published to efficiently solve the problem of rational secret sharing but only a handful of papers have touched upon the use of an asynchronous broadcast channel.[2] used cryptographic primitives, [3] used an interactive dealer, and [4] used an honest minority of players in order to handle an asynchronous broadcast channel.In our paper, we propose an m-out-of-n rational secret sharing scheme which can function over an asynchronous broadcast channel without the use of cryptographic primitives and with a non-interactive dealer.This is possible because our scheme uses a small number, k+1, of honest players.The protocol is resilient to coalitions of size up to k and furthermore it is ε-resilient to coalitions of size up to and including m-1.The protocol will have a strict Nash equilibrium with probability Pr ( ାଵ ) and an ε-Nash equilibrium with probability Pr ( ିିଵ ) .Furthermore, our protocol is immune to backward induction.Later on in the paper, we extend our results to include malicious players as well.We also show that our protocol handles the possibility of a player deviating in order to force another player to get a wrong value in what we believe to be a more time efficient manner than was done in Asharov and Lindell [5].
Rational secret sharing was first introduced by Halpern and Teague (STOC, 2004). Since then, a series of works have focused on designing rational secret sharing protocols. However, most existing solutions can share only one secret at one secret sharing process. To share multiple secrets such as m secrets, the dealer must redistribute shares for m times. In addition, previous works assume existence of broadcast channel which is not realistic. Motivated by those problems, this paper proposes a rational multi-secret sharing scheme, which combines the secret sharing scheme with game theory. In the protocol, the problem of sharing multiple secrets is addressed, and there are multiple secrets to be shared during one secret sharing process. Furthermore, this work starts off by constructing a protocol in simultaneous broadcast networks, and then we emulate the broadcast channel over point-to-point networks. Based on a computational assumption, we show that rational players have no incentive to deviate from the protocol and every player can obtain multi-secret fairly.
Rational secret sharing, first introduced by Halpern and Teague, means that whether players send their shares relies on their utilities, whereas in traditional scheme, players are assumed to contribute their shares willingly. This paper puts forward a rational secret-sharing scheme where players run their reconstruction protocol in point-to-point communication networks other than broadcast channels which are often used in previous papers. Kol and Naor propose an efficient t -out-of- n protocol for rational secret sharing without using cryptographic primitives while it has weak robustness to coalition when short player colludes with any long players. The protocol proposed by Fuchsbauer and Katz runs efficiently in asynchronous or point-to-point networks. Although it achieves strict Nash equilibrium and is stable with respect to trembles, it is susceptible to realise fairness among the whole party. This paper proposes a rational secret-sharing scheme in point-to-point communication networks to achieve fairness and robustness to coalition.
Abstract. Rational secret sharing was proposed by Halpern and Teague in [12]. The authors show that, in a setting with rational players, secret sharing and multiparty computation are only possible if the actual secret reconstruction round remains unknown to the players. All the subsequent works use a similar approach with different assumptions. We change the direction by bridging cryptography, game theory, and reputation systems, and propose a “social model ” for repeated rational secret sharing. We provide a novel scheme, named socio-rational secret sharing, in which players are invited to each game based on their reputations in the community. The players run secret sharing protocols while founding and sustaining a public trust network. As a result, new concepts such as a rational foresighted player, social game, and social Nash equilibrium are introduced. To motivate our approach, consider a repeated secret sharing game such as “secure auctions”, where the auctioneers receive sealed-bids from the bidders to compute the auction outcome without revealing the losing bids. If we assume each party has a reputation value, we can then penalize (or reward) the players who are selfish (or unselfish) from game to game. We show that this social reinforcement rationally stimulates the players to be cooperative.
The field of rational cryptography considers the design of cryptographic protocols in the presence of rational agents seeking to maximize local utility functions. This departs from the standard secure multiparty computation setting, where players are assumed to be either honest or malicious. We detail the construction of both a two-party and a multiparty game theoretic framework for constructing rational cryptographic protocols. Our framework specifies the utility function assumptions necessary to realize the privacy, correctness, and fairness guarantees for protocols. We demonstrate that our framework correctly models cryptographic protocols, such as rational secret sharing, where existing work considers equilibrium concepts that yield unreasonable equilibria. Similarly, we demonstrate that cryptography may be applied to the game theoretic domain, constructing an auction market not realizable in the original formulation. Additionally, we demonstrate that modeling players as rational agents allows us to design a protocol that destabilizes coalitions. Thus, we establish a mutual benefit from combining the two fields, while demonstrating the applicability of our framework to real-world market environments. We also give an application of game theory to adversarial interactions where cryptography is not necessary. Specifically, we consider adversarial machine learning, where the adversary is rational and reacts to the presence of a data miner. We give a general extension to classification algorithms that returns greater expected utility for the data miner than existing classification methods.