MPSS: Mobile Proactive Secret Sharing

Abstract

This article describes MPSS, a new way to do proactive secret sharing. MPSS provides mobility: The group of nodes holding the shares of the secret can change at each resharing, which is essential in a long-lived system. MPSS additionally allows the number of tolerated faulty shareholders to change when the secret is moved so that the system can tolerate more (or fewer) corruptions; this allows reconfiguration on-the-fly to accommodate changes in the environment. MPSS includes an efficient protocol that is intended to be used in practice. The protocol is optimized for the common case of no or few failures, but degradation when there are more failures is modest. MPSS contains a step in which nodes accuse proposals made by other nodes; we show a novel way to handle these accusations when their verity cannot be known. We also present a way to produce accusations that can be verified without releasing keys of other nodes; verifiable accusations improve the performance of MPSS, and are a useful primitive independent of MPSS.