Verifiable secret sharing and achieving simultaneity in the presence of faults

Abstract

Verifiable secret sharing is a cryptographic protocol that allows one to break a secret in 11 pieccs and publicly distribute thcln to 11 people so that tile secret is reconstructible given only sufficiently many pieces. 'rhe novelty is that everyone can verify that all received a "valid" piece of the secret without having any idea of what the secret is. One application of this tool is the simulation of simultaneous-broadcast networks on semi-synchronous broadcast networks.