1,785 research outputs found
Ideal hierarchical secret sharing schemes
Hierarchical secret sharing is among the most natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing, and it has attracted a lot of attention from the invention of secret sharing until nowadays. Several constructions of ideal hierarchical secret sharing schemes have been proposed, but it was not known what access structures admit such a scheme. We solve this problem by providing a natural definition for the family of the hierarchical access structures and, more importantly, by presenting a complete characterization of the ideal hierarchical access structures, that is, the ones admitting an ideal secret sharing scheme. Our characterization deals with the properties of the hierarchically minimal sets of the access structure, which are the minimal qualified sets whose participants are in the lowest possible levels in the hierarchy. By using our characterization, it can be efficiently checked whether any given hierarchical access structure that is defined by its hierarchically minimal sets is ideal. We use the well known connection between ideal secret sharing and matroids and, in particular, the fact that every ideal access structure is a matroid port. In addition, we use recent results on ideal multipartite access structures and the connection between multipartite matroids and integer polymatroids. We prove that every ideal hierarchical access structure is the port of a representable matroid and, more specifically, we prove that every ideal structure in this family admits ideal linear secret sharing schemes over fields of all characteristics. In addition, methods to construct such ideal schemes can be derived from the results in this paper and the aforementioned ones on ideal multipartite secret sharing. Finally, we use our results to find a new proof for the characterization of the ideal weighted threshold access structures that is simpler than the existing one.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
On the optimization of bipartite secret sharing schemes
Optimizing the ratio between the maximum length of the shares and the length of the secret value in secret sharing schemes for general access structures is an extremely difficult and long-standing open problem. In this paper, we study it for bipartite access structures, in which the set of participants is divided in two parts, and all participants in each part play an equivalent role. We focus on the search of lower bounds by using a special class of polymatroids that is introduced here, the tripartite ones. We present a method based on linear programming to compute, for every given bipartite access structure, the best lower bound that can be obtained by this combinatorial method. In addition, we obtain some general lower bounds that improve the previously known ones, and we construct optimal secret sharing schemes for a family of bipartite access structures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Infinite Secret Sharing -- Examples
The motivation for extending secret sharing schemes to cases when either the
set of players is infinite or the domain from which the secret and/or the
shares are drawn is infinite or both, is similar to the case when switching to
abstract probability spaces from classical combinatorial probability. It might
shed new light on old problems, could connect seemingly unrelated problems, and
unify diverse phenomena.
Definitions equivalent in the finitary case could be very much different when
switching to infinity, signifying their difference. The standard requirement
that qualified subsets should be able to determine the secret has different
interpretations in spite of the fact that, by assumption, all participants have
infinite computing power. The requirement that unqualified subsets should have
no, or limited information on the secret suggests that we also need some
probability distribution. In the infinite case events with zero probability are
not necessarily impossible, and we should decide whether bad events with zero
probability are allowed or not.
In this paper, rather than giving precise definitions, we enlist an abundance
of hopefully interesting infinite secret sharing schemes. These schemes touch
quite diverse areas of mathematics such as projective geometry, stochastic
processes and Hilbert spaces. Nevertheless our main tools are from probability
theory. The examples discussed here serve as foundation and illustration to the
more theory oriented companion paper
Optimal non-perfect uniform secret sharing schemes
A secret sharing scheme is non-perfect if some subsets of participants that cannot recover the secret value have partial information about it. The information ratio of a secret sharing scheme is the ratio between the maximum length of the shares and the length of the secret. This work is dedicated to the search of bounds on the information ratio of non-perfect secret sharing schemes. To this end, we extend the known connections between polymatroids and perfect secret sharing schemes to the non-perfect case. In order to study non-perfect secret sharing schemes in all generality, we describe their structure through their access function, a real function that measures the amount of information that every subset of participants obtains about the secret value. We prove that there exists a secret sharing scheme for every access function. Uniform access functions, that is, the ones whose values depend only on the number of participants, generalize the threshold access structures. Our main result is to determine the optimal information ratio of the uniform access functions. Moreover, we present a construction of linear secret sharing schemes with optimal information ratio for the rational uniform access functions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
On Ideal Secret-Sharing Schemes for -homogeneous access structures
A -uniform hypergraph is a hypergraph where each -hyperedge has exactly
vertices. A -homogeneous access structure is represented by a
-uniform hypergraph , in which the participants correspond to
the vertices of hypergraph . A set of vertices can reconstruct the
secret value from their shares if they are connected by a -hyperedge, while
a set of non-adjacent vertices does not obtain any information about the
secret. One parameter for measuring the efficiency of a secret sharing scheme
is the information rate, defined as the ratio between the length of the secret
and the maximum length of the shares given to the participants. Secret sharing
schemes with an information rate equal to one are called ideal secret sharing
schemes. An access structure is considered ideal if an ideal secret sharing
scheme can realize it. Characterizing ideal access structures is one of the
important problems in secret sharing schemes. The characterization of ideal
access structures has been studied by many authors~\cite{BD, CT,JZB,
FP1,FP2,DS1,TD}. In this paper, we characterize ideal -homogeneous access
structures using the independent sequence method. In particular, we prove that
the reduced access structure of is an -threshold access
structure when the optimal information rate of is larger than
, where is a -homogeneous access structure
satisfying specific criteria.Comment: 19 page
Secret sharing and duality
Secret sharing is an important building block in cryptography. All explicitly
defined secret sharing schemes with known exact complexity bounds are
multi-linear, thus are closely related to linear codes. The dual of such a
linear scheme, in the sense of duality of linear codes, gives another scheme
for the dual access structure. These schemes have the same complexity, namely
the largest share size relative to the secret size is the same. It is a
long-standing open problem whether this fact is true in general: the complexity
of any access structure is the same as the complexity of its dual. We give an
almost answer to this question. An almost perfect scheme allows negligible
errors, both in the recovery and in the independence. There exists an almost
perfect ideal scheme on 174 participants whose complexity is strictly smaller
than that of its dual
Secret sharing schemes: Optimizing the information ratio
Secret sharing refers to methods used to distribute a secret value among a set of participants. This work deals with the optimization of two parameters regarding the efficiency of a secret sharing scheme: the information ratio and average information ratio. Only access structures (a special family of sets) on 5 and 6 participants will be considered. First, access structures with 5 participants will be studied, followed by the ones on 6 participants that are based on graphs. The main goal of the paper is to check existing lower bounds (and improve some of them) by using linear programs with the sage solver. Shannon information inequalities have been used to translate the polymatroid axioms into linear constraints
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