Repairing Reed-Solomon Codes over Prime Fields via Exponential Sums

• Main Authors: Con, Roni, Shutty, Noah, Tamo, Itzhak, Wootters, Mary
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 04-02-2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Information Theory; Mathematics - Information Theory
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.02358

This paper presents two repair schemes for low-rate Reed-Solomon (RS) codes
over prime fields that can repair any node by downloading a constant number of
bits from each surviving node. The total bandwidth resulting from these schemes
is greater than that incurred during trivial repair; however, this is
particularly relevant in the context of leakage-resilient secret sharing. In
that framework, our results provide attacks showing that $k$-out-of-$n$
Shamir's Secret Sharing over prime fields for small $k$ is not
leakage-resilient, even when the parties leak only a constant number of bits.
To the best of our knowledge, these are the first such attacks.
Our results are derived from a novel connection between exponential sums and
the repair of RS codes. Specifically, we establish that non-trivial bounds on
certain exponential sums imply the existence of explicit nonlinear repair
schemes for RS codes over prime fields.