Asynchronous secret sharing protocols compared for real system trade offs
Asynchronous Verifiable and Complete Secret Sharing: From Design Patterns to System-Level Trade-offs
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Sharing secrets safely among many parties is tricky when some may act maliciously and messages can be delayed. The authors study different secret sharing methods designed to work even if some participants are faulty or slow. They build a common platform to test these methods fairly and find that often simple message counts don’t predict speed or efficiency well. Their work helps future builders pick or improve protocols based on concrete costs rather than theory alone.
What this means in practice
- •For distributed system engineers: Choose the best asynchronous secret sharing protocol by evaluating real trade-offs in latency, bandwidth, and CPU use across system designs.
- •For blockchain node developers: Optimize blockchain protocols with robust secret sharing schemes that minimize costly recovery steps and critical path delays under faulty conditions.
Authors
Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix, Martin Zivojinovic, Leo Mendiboure, Tom Claudel, Laurent Réveillère
Abstract
Modern secret sharing protocols promise robust secret sharing in fully asynchronous Byzantine systems, but their practical costs remain difficult to compare across papers, assumptions, and workloads. The difficulty is not merely experimental: protocols with similar asymptotic guarantees often place very different work on the critical path through their choices of dissemination, verification, batching, and recovery. This paper turns that fragmented research landscape into a corpus-backed designspace analysis and systems evaluation of asynchronous verifiable and complete secret sharing. We derive a design sieve, select seven representative protocols, and implement them in a common Rust framework. In our experiments on the Grid'5000 platform, we evaluate honest-dealer and faulty-dealer stress executions using latency, throughput, message count, bandwidth, and aggregate CPU-time. The results show that message complexity alone poorly predicts latency, that optimistic paths can be dominated by recovery cost, and that batching or packing helps only when verification stays off the critical path. These findings turn protocol-by-protocol comparisons into design-to-cost guidance for choosing, implementing, and extending asynchronous verifiable and complete sharing protocols.