970 research outputs found
The combinatorics of generalised cumulative arrays.
In this paper we present a combinatorial analysis of generalised cumulative arrays.
These are structures that are associated with a monotone collections of subsets of a base set and
have properties that find application in areas of information security. We propose a number of basic
measures of efficiency of a generalised cumulative array and then study fundamental bounds on
their parameters. We then look at a number of construction techniques and show that the problem
of finding good generalised cumulative arrays is closely related to the problem of finding boolean
expressions with special properties
An Epitome of Multi Secret Sharing Schemes for General Access Structure
Secret sharing schemes are widely used now a days in various applications,
which need more security, trust and reliability. In secret sharing scheme, the
secret is divided among the participants and only authorized set of
participants can recover the secret by combining their shares. The authorized
set of participants are called access structure of the scheme. In Multi-Secret
Sharing Scheme (MSSS), k different secrets are distributed among the
participants, each one according to an access structure. Multi-secret sharing
schemes have been studied extensively by the cryptographic community. Number of
schemes are proposed for the threshold multi-secret sharing and multi-secret
sharing according to generalized access structure with various features. In
this survey we explore the important constructions of multi-secret sharing for
the generalized access structure with their merits and demerits. The features
like whether shares can be reused, participants can be enrolled or dis-enrolled
efficiently, whether shares have to modified in the renewal phase etc., are
considered for the evaluation
Anonymity in Shared Symmetric Key Primitives
We provide a stronger definition of anonymity in the context of shared symmetric key primitives, and show that existing schemes do not provide this level of anonymity. A new scheme is presented to share symmetric key operations amongst a set of participants according to a (t, n)-threshold access structure. We quantify the amount of information the output of the shared operation provides about the group of participants which collaborated to produce it.
On Real-valued Visual Cryptographic Basis Matrices
Visual cryptography (VC) encodes an image into noise-like shares, which can be stacked to reveal a reduced quality version of the original. The problem with encrypting colour images is that they must undergo heavy pre-processing to reduce them to binary, entailing significant quality loss. This paper proposes VC that works directly on intermediate grayscale values per colour channel and demonstrates real-valued basis matrices for this purpose. The resulting stacked shares produce a clearer reconstruction than in binary VC, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first method posing no restrictions on colour values
while maintaining the ability to decrypt with human vision. Grayscale and colour images of differing entropies are encrypted using fuzzy OR and XOR, and their PSNR and structural similarities are compared with binary VC to demonstrate improved quality. It is compared with previous research and its advantages highlighted, notably in high quality reconstructions with minimal processing
Society-oriented cryptographic techniques for information protection
Groups play an important role in our modern world. They are more reliable and more trustworthy than individuals. This is the reason why, in an organisation, crucial decisions are left to a group of people rather than to an individual. Cryptography supports group activity by offering a wide range of cryptographic operations which can only be successfully executed if a well-defined group of people agrees to co-operate. This thesis looks at two fundamental cryptographic tools that are useful for the management of secret information. The first part looks in detail at secret sharing schemes. The second part focuses on society-oriented cryptographic systems, which are the application of secret sharing schemes in cryptography. The outline of thesis is as follows
Error Decodable Secret Sharing and One-Round Perfectly Secure Message Transmission for General Adversary Structures
An error decodable secret-sharing scheme is a secret-sharing
scheme with the additional property that the secret can be
recovered from the set of all shares, even after a coalition of
participants corrupts the shares they possess. In this paper we
consider schemes that can tolerate corruption by sets of
participants belonging to a monotone coalition structure, thus
generalising both a related notion studied by Kurosawa, and the
well-known error-correction properties of threshold schemes based
on Reed-Solomon codes. We deduce a necessary and sufficient
condition for the existence of such schemes, and we show how to
reduce the storage requirements of a technique of Kurosawa for
constructing error-decodable secret-sharing schemes with efficient
decoding algorithms.
In addition, we explore the connection between one-round perfectly
secure message transmission (PSMT) schemes with general adversary
structures and secret-sharing schemes, and we exploit this
connection to investigate factors affecting the performance of
one-round PSMT schemes such as the number of channels required,
the communication overhead, and the efficiency of message recovery
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