Volume 5 - Issue 2
Sequential Secret Sharing as a New Hierarchical Access Structure
- Mehrdad Nojoumian
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida, USA
mnojoumian@fau.edu
- Douglas R. Stinson
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
dstinson@uwaterloo.ca
Keywords: Secret Sharing, Access Structure, Dynamic Scheme, Threshold Changeability.
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.