In secret sharing the goal is to distribute a sensitive information amongs participants in such a way that only some pre-defined set of participants can recover the secret, and the unqualified set of participants cannot compute any information about the secret.

In secure multiparty computatiton (MPC) a set participants want to compute a function (e.g. sum, maximum) of their private input in a way that the result is public but no information is revealed about their inputs. An important application of secure multiparty computation is multi-signatures (more than one participant needed to generate a valid signatute), also MPC is applicable to protect privacy.