Sequential Secret Sharing as a New Hierarchical Access Structure

Mehrdad Nojoumian1+ and Douglas R. Stinson2
 

1Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
 Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida, USA
 mnojoumian@fau.edu

2University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
dstinson@uwaterloo.ca

 

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, \textit{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.

Keywords: Secret Sharing, Access Structure, Dynamic Scheme, Threshold Changeability

 

+: Corresponding author: Mehrdad Nojoumian
College of Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431.
Tel: +1 (561) 297-3411, Web: http://faculty.eng.fau.edu/nojoumian/
 

Journal of Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS), 5(2): 24-32, May 2015 [pdf]