Efficient explicit constructions of compartmented secret sharing schemes

Abstract

Multipartite secret sharing schemes have been an important object of study in the area of secret sharing schemes. Two interesting families of multipartite access structures are hierarchical access structures and compartmented access structures. This work deals with efficient and explicit constructions of ideal compartmented secret sharing schemes, while most of the known constructions are either inefficient or randomized. We construct ideal linear secret sharing schemes for three types of compartmented access structures, such as compartmented access structures with upper bounds, compartmented access structures with lower bounds, and compartmented access structures with upper and lower bounds. There exist some methods to construct ideal linear schemes realizing these compartmented access structures in the literature, but those methods are inefficient in general because non-singularity of many matrices has to be determined to check the correctness of the scheme. Our constructions do not need to do these computations. Our methods to construct ideal linear schemes realizing these access structures combine polymatroid-based techniques with Gabidulin codes. Gabidulin codes play a fundamental role in the constructions, and their properties imply that our methods are efficient.