Local Leakage Resilience of Shamir Secret Sharing: Below Half Threshold Rate

We study the local leakage resilience of Shamir secret sharing, where an adversary leaks a bounded number of bits from every share. For $n$ parties and reconstruction threshold $k$ over a prime field ${\mathbb{F}}_p$ with $p>n$, we prove the following. (1) There is an absolute constant $c_{\mathrm{b}\mathrm{h}}<1\mathrm{/}2$ such that, for $k\ge c_{\mathrm{b}\mathrm{h}}n$, Shamir sharing is resilient to arbitrary one-bit leakage from every share. The best previous threshold was $0.668n$. (2) For every fixed $0<\delta <1\mathrm{/}2$ and $k\ge (1\mathrm{/}2+\delta )n$, Shamir sharing is resilient to $\lfloor \frac{\delta }{24}{\log }_{2}n\rfloor$ bits of arbitrary local leakage per share. By a recent attack, this number of bits is optimal up to a constant factor depending on $\delta$. (3) For every fixed threshold rate $c>0$ and $k\ge cn$, Shamir sharing is resilient to quadratic-residue leakage and to almost all local leakage functions of up to ${\eta }_c{\log }_{2}p$ bits, for a constant ${\eta }_c>0$. All three results follow from one analytic framework, which we develop for generalized Reed–Solomon codes: local leakage from a uniform codeword is statistically close to the same leakage from independent uniform field elements. The framework expresses the leakage distance as the norm of a function on the leakage outputs. The Efron–Stein decomposition splits this function into orthogonal components indexed by supports of dual codewords. Two tools bound the components: list recovery of the dual code, which is ordinary list decoding for one-bit leakage, and a generalized von Neumann inequality for MDS systems of linear forms that retains linearly many Gowers norms. The first tool gives the result above half, the second gives the constant-rate result, and applying both to different ranges of supports in the same decomposition gives the result below half.