Elementary symmetric polynomials in Shamir's scheme

Abstract

The concept of k-admissible tracks in Shamir's secret sharing scheme over a finite field was introduced by Schinzel et al. (2009) [10]. Using some estimates for the elementary symmetric polynomials, we show that the track ( 1 , … , n ) over F p is practically always k-admissible; i.e., the scheme allows to place the secret as an arbitrary coefficient of its generic polynomial even for relatively small p. Here k is the threshold and n the number of shareholders.