Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/403

Sequential Secret Sharing as a New Hierarchical Access Structure

Mehrdad Nojoumian and Douglas R. Stinson

Abstract: Due to the rapid growth of the next generation networking and system technologies, computer networks require new design and management. In this context, security, and more specifically, access structures have been one of the major concerns. As such, in this article, sequential secret sharing (SQS), as an application of dynamic threshold schemes, is introduced. In this new cryptographic primitive, different (but related) secrets with increasing thresholds are shared among a set of players who have different levels of authority. Subsequently, each subset of the players can only recover the secret in their own level. Finally, the master secret will be revealed if all the secrets in the higher levels are first recovered. We briefly review the existing threshold modification techniques. We then present our construction and compare it with other hierarchical secret sharing schemes such as disjunctive and conjunctive multilevel secret sharing protocols.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Secret Sharing, Access Structure, Dynamic Scheme, Threshold Changeability.

Date: received 28 Apr 2015

Contact author: mnojoumian at fau edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20150501:121122 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/403

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