Abstract. 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 [arXiv:1310.7423].
Abstract. 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 [arXiv:1310.7423].
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 [arXiv:1310.7423].
A probabilistic secret sharing scheme is a joint probability distribution of the shares and the secret together with a collection of secret recovery functions.The study of schemes using arbitrary probability spaces and unbounded number of participants allows us to investigate their abstract properties, to connect the topic to other branches of mathematics, and to discover new design paradigms.A scheme is perfect if unqualified subsets have no information on the secret, that is, their total share is independent of the secret.By relaxing this security requirement, three other scheme types are defined.Our first result is that every (infinite) access structure can be realized by a perfect scheme where the recovery functions are non-measurable.The construction is based on a paradoxical pair of independent random variables which determine each other.Restricting the recovery functions to be measurable ones, we give a complete characterization of access structures realizable by each type of the schemes.In addition, either a vector-space or a Hilbert-space based scheme is constructed realizing the access structure.While the former one uses the traditional uniform distributions, the latter one uses Gaussian distributions, leading to a new design paradigm.
The study of probabilistic secret sharing schemes using arbitrary probability spaces and possibly infinite number of participants lets us investigate abstract properties of such schemes. It highlights important properties, explains why certain definitions work better than others, connects this topic to other branches of mathematics, and might yield new design paradigms. A probabilistic secret sharing scheme is a joint probability distribution of the shares and the secret together with a collection of secret recovery functions for qualified subsets. The scheme is measurable if the recovery functions are measurable. Depending on how much information an unqualified subset might have, we define four scheme types: perfect, almost perfect, ramp, and almost ramp. Our main results characterize the access structures which can be realized by schemes of these types. We show that every access structure can be realized by a non-measurable perfect probabilistic scheme. The construction is based on a paradoxical pair of independent random variables which determine each other. For measurable schemes we have the following complete characterization. An access structure can be realized by a (measurable) perfect, or almost perfect scheme if and only if the access structure, as a subset of the Sierpiński space {0, 1} P, is open, if and only if it can be realized by a span program. The access structure can be realized by a (measurable) ramp or almost ramp scheme if and only if the access structure is a Gδ set (intersection of countably many open sets) in the Sierpiński topology, if and only if it can be realized by a Hilbert-space program.
In this thesis we discussed secret haring for infinite secret domains. The first part of the thesis is devoted to the result by Chor and Kushilevitz. We proved an impossibility of secret haring over countable set of secrets and shares. Our result is slightly more general the the one by Chor and Kushilevitz. Also we gave several counterexamples which show an importance of assumptions in our theorem. Later we discussed possible definition of secret sharing over continuum set of secrets. Particularly, using the idea by Gabor Tardos, we constructed a scheme that shows that the definition by Chor and Kushilevitz is ”intuitively incorrect”. Namely, it is possible that an unqualified set of players can reconstruct the secret. We suggested a modified definition and showed that the positive result by Chor and Kushilevitz holds for the new definition. Finally we gave an introduction to Lebesgue-Rokhlin probability spaces and showed that a secret from such spaces can be shared. We suggest a further research in this direction. It seems that the converse is true. Namely, if a secret sharing scheme exists for a secret picked up from a probability space, then this space is Lebesgue-Rokhlin. As a short digression we presented a nice scheme for the situation when a secret is a branch of a binary tree(possible infinite). This scheme seems to be useful as it allows to compute several primitives on a secret without any communication between participants. In the last part of the thesis we presented our concept of perfect uniform non-probabilistic secret sharing, in which we avoid the idea of probability and concentrate on cardinalities. We showed that there exists a perfect uniform non-probabilistic secret sharing scheme for any secret domain and any access structure(possibly infinite).
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) allows a dealer to distribute a secret quantum state among a set of parties in such a way that certain authorized subsets can reconstruct the secret, while unauthorized subsets obtain no information about it. Previous works on QSS for general access structures focused solely on the existence of perfectly secure schemes, and the share size of the known schemes is necessarily exponential even in cases where the access structure is computed by polynomial size monotone circuits. This stands in stark contrast to the classical setting, where polynomial-time computationally-secure secret sharing schemes have been long known for all access structures computed by polynomial-size monotone circuits under standard hardness assumptions, and one can even obtain shares which are much shorter than the secret (which is impossible with perfect security). While QSS was introduced over twenty years ago, previous works only considered information-theoretic privacy. In this work, we initiate the study of computationally-secure QSS and show that computational assumptions help significantly in building QSS schemes, just as in the classical case. We present a simple compiler and use it to obtain a large variety results: We construct polynomial-time computationally-secure QSS schemes under standard hardness assumptions for a rich class of access structures. This includes many access structures for which previous results in QSS necessarily required exponential share size. In fact, we can go even further: We construct QSS schemes for which the size of the quantum shares is significantly smaller than the size of the secret. As in the classical setting, this is impossible with perfect security. We also apply our compiler to obtain results beyond computational QSS. In the information-theoretic setting, we improve the share size of perfect QSS schemes for a large class of n-party access structures to 1.5^{n+o(n)}, improving upon best known schemes and matching the best known result for general access structures in the classical setting. Finally, among other things, we study the class of access structures which can be efficiently implemented when the quantum secret sharing scheme has access to a given number of copies of the secret, including all such functions in 𝖯 and NP.
We extend the notion of perfect secret sharing scheme for access structures with infinitely many participants. In particular we investigate cases when the participants are the vertices of an (infinite) graph, and the minimal qualified sets are the edges. The (worst case) information ratio of an access structure is the largest lower bound on the amount of information some participantmustrememberforeachbitinthesecret -- justtheinverseoftheinformationrate. Wedeterminethisvalueforseveralin honeycomb lattices; and give upper and finite graphs: lower bounds in on finite path, two-dimensional square and It is also shown that the information ratio is not necessarily the ratio local, for the i.e. triangular all nite spanned lattice. subgraphs have strictly smaller ratio than the whole graph. several open problems.