Asynchronous Verifiable and Complete Secret Sharing: From Design Patterns to System-Level Trade-offs
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.