The Computer Security Division (CSD) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is interested in promoting the security of implementations and operation of cryptographic primitives. This security depends not only on the theoretical properties of the primitives but also on the ability to withstand attacks on their implementations and operations. It is thus important to mitigate breakdowns that result from differences between ideal and real implementations of cryptographic algorithms, and to enable distribution of trust across operators. Once criteria are in place, the selection and standardization of concrete schemes should include considerations for the applicable validation methodologies.
At a basic level, secret sharing enables splitting a secret key into two or more "shares" across different components or parties, such that the compromise of one (or more, but not all) of the shares does not reveal information about the original key. Using appropriate threshold techniques, the shares can then be separately processed, leading the computation to a correct result as if the original secret key had been processed by a classic algorithm. The security of the operation can be guaranteed even if up to a threshold number f of components has been compromised. This includes providing resistance against side-channel attacks, which exploit inadvertent leakage from real implementations. The threshold approach can thus significantly strengthen the confidentiality of secret keys in cryptographic implementations. Areas of relevant related research include secure multi-party computation, intrusion tolerant distributed systems, and threshold circuit design.
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