[BGI15] Function Secret Sharing

Authors: Elette Boyle, Niv Gilboa, Yuval Ishai | Venue: Eurocrypt 2015 | Source

Abstract

Motivated by the goal of securely searching and updating distributed data, we introduce and study the notion of function secret sharing (FSS). This new notion is a natural generalization of distributed point functions (DPF), a primitive that was recently introduced by Gilboa and Ishai (Eurocrypt 2014). Given a positive integer and a class of functions , where is an Abelian group, a -party FSS scheme for allows one to split each into succinctly described functions , , such that: (1) , and (2) any strict subset of the hides . Thus, an FSS for can be thought of as method for succinctly performing an “additive secret sharing” of functions from . The original definition of DPF coincides with a two-party FSS for the class of point functions, namely the class of functions that have a nonzero output on at most one input.

We present two types of results. First, we obtain efficiency improvements and extensions of the original DPF construction. Then, we initiate a systematic study of general FSS, providing some constructions and establishing relations with other cryptographic primitives. More concretely, we obtain the following main results:

  • Improved DPF. We present an improved (two-party) DPF construction from a pseudorandom generator (PRG), reducing the length of the key describing each from to , where is the PRG seed length.
  • Multi-party DPF. We present the first nontrivial construction of a -party DPF for , obtaining a near-quadratic improvement over a naive construction that additively shares the truth-table of . This construction too can be based on any PRG.
  • FSS for simple functions. We present efficient PRG-based FSS constructions for natural function classes that extend point functions, including interval functions and partial matching functions.
  • A study of general FSS. We show several relations between general FSS and other cryptographic primitives. These include a construction of general FSS via obfuscation, an indication for the implausibility of constructing general FSS from weak cryptographic assumptions such as the existence of one-way functions, a completeness result, and a relation with pseudorandom functions.

Research supported by the European Union’s Tenth Framework Programme (FP10/2010-2016) under grant agreement no. 259426 ERC-CaC. The first and third authors were additionally supported by ISF grants 1361/10 and 1709/14 and BSF grant 2012378.