Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2001/087

A Linear Algebraic Approach to Metering Schemes

C. Blundo and S. Martìn and B. Masucci and C. Padrò

Abstract: A metering scheme is a method by which an audit agency is able to measure the interaction between servers and clients during a certain number of time frames. Naor and Pinkas proposed metering schemes where any server is able to compute a proof, i.e., a value to be shown to the audit agency at the end of each time frame, if and only if it has been visited by a number of clients larger than or equal to some threshold $h$ during the time frame. Masucci and Stinson showed how to construct a metering scheme realizing any access structure, where the access structure is the family of all subsets of clients which enable a server to compute its proof. They also provided lower bounds on the communication complexity of metering schemes.

In this paper we describe a linear algebraic approach to design metering schemes realizing any access structure. Namely, given any access structure, we present a method to construct a metering scheme realizing it from any linear secret sharing scheme with the same access structure. Besides, we prove some properties about the relationship between metering schemes and secret sharing schemes. These properties provide some new bounds on the information distributed to clients and servers in a metering scheme. According to these bounds, the optimality of the metering schemes obtained by our method relies upon the optimality of the linear secret sharing schemes for the given access structure.

Category / Keywords: electronic commerce and payment, secret sharing, information theory

Date: received 26 Oct 2001

Contact author: masucci at dia unisa it

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20011026:130526 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2001/087

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