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Facta Universitatis Series Mathematics and Informatics

NEW METHOD TO COMPUTE BOUNDS ON THE OPTIMAL INFORMATION RATE OF SECRET SHARING SCHEMES

Abbas Cheraghi

Published Nov 21, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In a bipartite secret sharing scheme, the set of participants is divided into two parts, and all participants in each part play an equivalent role. The ideal bipartite access structures were characterized by Padr´o and S´aez, but it is not known which is the optimal information rate of non ideal bipartite access structures. Determining the optimal information rate of general access structures is one of the major problems in secret sharing. We study this open problem restricted to the bipartite access structures, obtaining a new method to compute bounds on the optimal information rate. Namely, by using the connection between secret sharing schemes and polymatroids, we show a linear programming problem that determines, for each access structure, an upper bound on the information rate. Moreover, we show new optimal constructions for certain bipartite access structures.

DOI
10.22190/fumi240824056c

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•Jul 5, 2014•0 citations
In a bipartite secret sharing scheme, the set of participants is divided into two parts, and all participants in each part play an equivalent role. The ideal bipartite access structures were characterized by Padr´o and S´aez, but it is not known which is the optimal information rate of non ideal bipartite access structures. Determining the optimal information rate of general access structures is one of the major problems in secret sharing. We study this open problem restricted to the bipartite access structures, obtaining a new method to compute bounds on the optimal information rate. Namely, by using the connection between secret sharing schemes and polymatroids, we show a linear programming problem that determines, for each access structure, an upper bound on the information rate. Moreover, we show new optimal constructions for certain bipartite access structures.
We study the information rate of secret sharing schemes whose access structure is bipartite. In a bipartite access structure there are two classes of participants and all participants in the same class play an equivalent role in the structure. We characterize completely the bipartite access structures that can be realized by an ideal secret sharing scheme. Both upper and lower bounds on the optimal information rate of bipartite access structures are given. These results are applied to the particular case of weighted threshold access structure with two weights.
Optimizing the maximum, or average, length of the shares in relation to the length of the secret for every given access structure is a difficult and long-standing open problem in cryptology. Most of the known lower bounds on these parameters have been obtained by implicitly or explicitly using that every secret sharing scheme defines a polymatroid related to the access structure. The best bounds that can be obtained by this combinatorial method can be determined by using linear programming, and this can be effectively done for access structures on a small number of participants. By applying this linear programming approach, we improve some of the known lower bounds for the access structures on five participants and the graph access structures on six participants for which these parameters were still undetermined. Nevertheless, the lower bounds that are obtained by this combinatorial method are not tight in general. For some access structures, they can be improved by adding to the linear program non-Shannon information inequalities as new constraints. We obtain in this way new separation results for some graph access structures on eight participants and for some ports of non-representable matroids. Finally, we prove that, for two access structures on five participants, the combinatorial lower bound cannot be attained by any linear secret sharing scheme.
This thesis is dedicated to the study of secret sharing schemes, which are cryptographic methods to share information in a secure way. The topics that are considered in the thesis are two of the main open problems in secret sharing: the characterization of the ideal access structures and the optimization of the length of the shares for general access structures. These open problems are studied for multipartite secret sharing schemes. In these schemes the set of participants is divided into parts and the participants in each part have the same rights to obtain the secret. The results of the thesis are based on a new combinatorial property of secret sharing schemes, which is a connection between ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes and integer polymatroids. It provides new sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for an access structure to be ideal. Moreover, this connection is also used in the construction ideal linear multipartite secret sharing schemes. These results are useful for the study of multipartite access structures in which the number of parts is small in relation to the number of participants, and multipartite access structures in which the parts are related in a special way. This is the case of the family of hierarchical access structures, which are the ones in which the participants can be hierarchically ordered, and the family of tripartite access structures. Applying these results, the ideal access structures in these families are completely characterized. All the ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes presented in the literature are related to a particular family of integer polymatroids, the boolean ones. The analysis of these polymatroids leds to the find of new ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes. The optimization of the length of the shares is also studied for multipartite secret sharing schemes, in particular for the bipartite ones. The main results are a new method to find bound on the length of the shares that combines linear El tema d'aquesta tesi són els esquemes de compartició de secrets, uns mètodes criptogràfics que permeten fragmentar missatges de manera segura. En particular s'aborden dos dels principals problemes oberts en aquest camp: la caracterització de les estructures d'accés que admeten esquemes de compartició de secrets ideals i l'optimització de la llargada dels fragments en construccions per estructures d'accés generals. Aquests problemes oberts s'estudien per estructures d'accés multipartides, que són estructures en què el conjunt de participants està dividit en diferents parts i a cada part tots els participants tenen el mateix rol. Aquest plantejament resulta útil per estudiar famílies d'estructures d'accés en què el nombre de parts és petit i estructures en què hi ha alguna relació especial entre les parts, com les jeràrquiques i les compartmentades. L'eina principal d'aquest estudi és una nova propietat de les estructures ideals que es presenta en aquesta tesi, una connexió entre les estructures ideals multipartides i els polimatroides enters. A partir d'aquesta connexió s'obté una condició suficient i una de necessària perquè una estructura d'accés multipartida sigui ideal. Així, aquesta connexió permet discutir la idealitat de les estructures d'accés i també, en el cas que el polimatoride sigui representable, construir esquemes ideals a partir de les representacions. Aplicant aquests resultats s'obté un nou marc per descriure i analitzar mètodes per construir esquemes multipartits ideals. Com a resultat d'aquest estudi s'obté una caracterització completa de les estructures d'accés tripartides ideals i de les jeràrquiques ideals. Una estructura és jeràrquica si el conjunt de participants es pot ordenar de tal manera que si en un conjunt autoritzat es canvia un participant per un de jeràrquicament superior, el nou conjunt també és autoritzat. A partir d'aquest resultat s'obté una nova caracterització de les estructures de llindar amb pesos ideals. Després d'analitzar tots els esquemes de compartició de secrets ideals multipartits presentats fins l'actualitat, es mostra que tots ells estan relacionats amb una família molt senzilla de polimatroides enters, els booleans. A partir d'aquests polimatroides s'obté una nova família d'estructures ideals, les compartmentades, que inclouen diverses famílies estudiades prèviament. L'altre problema obert considerat a la tesi, l'estudi de l'optimització de la llargada dels fragments, es centra en les estructures bipartides. Combinant tècniques de programació lineal i polimatroides, es presenta un mètode per calcular fites en la llargada dels fragments per estructures d'accés no ideals que és vàlid per qualsevol estructura multipartida. A partir de tècniques algebraiques es presenten noves fites i una família d'esquemes bipartits òptims.
We present a new improvement in the linear programming technique to derive lower bounds on the information ratio of secret sharing schemes. We obtain non-Shannon-type bounds without using information inequalities explicitly. Our new technique makes it possible to determine the optimal information ratio of linear secret sharing schemes for all access structures on 5 participants and all graph-based access structures on 6 participants. In addition, new lower bounds are presented also for some small matroid ports and, in particular, the optimal information ratios of the linear secret sharing schemes for the ports of the Vamos matroid are determined.
A perfect secret-sharing scheme is a method to distribute a secret among a set of participants in such a way that only qualified subsets of participants can recover the secret and the joint share of participants in any unqualified subset is statistically independent of the secret. The collection of all qualified subsets is called the access structure of the perfect secret-sharing scheme. In a graph-based access structure, each vertex of a graph G represents a participant and each edge of G represents a minimal qualified subset. The average information ratio of a perfect secret-sharing scheme realizing the access structure based on G is defined as AR = (Pv2V (G) H(v))/(|V (G)|H(s)), where s is the secret and v is the share of v, both are random variables from and H is the Shannon entropy. The infimum of the average information ratio of all possible perfect secret-sharing schemes realizing a given access structure is called the optimal average information ratio of that access structure. Most known results about the optimal average information ratio give upper bounds or lower bounds on it. In this present structures based on bipartite graphs and determine the exact values of the optimal average information ratio of some infinite classes of them.
In a perfect secret-sharing scheme, a dealer distributes a secret among a set of participants in such a way that only qualified subsets of participants can recover the secret and the joint share of the participants in any unqualified subset is statistically independent of the secret. The access structure of the scheme refers to the collection of all qualified subsets. In a graph-based access structures, each vertex of a graph G represents a participant and each edge of G represents a minimal qualified subset. The average information ratio of a perfect secret-sharing scheme realizing a given access structure is the ratio of the average length of the shares given to the participants to the length of the secret. The infimum of the average information ratio of all possible perfect secret-sharing schemes realizing an access structure is called the optimal average information ratio of that access structure. We study the optimal average information ratio of the access structures based on bipartite graphs. Based on some previous results, we give a bound on the optimal average information ratio for all bipartite graphs of girth at least six. This bound is the best possible for some classes of bipartite graphs using our approach.