Secret Sharing Schemes with Applications in Security Protocols.
Sorin Iftene · 2006
A secret sharing scheme starts with a secret and then derives from it certain shares (or shadows) which are distributed to users. The secret may be recovered only by certain predetermined groups which belong to the access structure. Secret sharing schemes have been independently introduced by Blakley [12] and Shamir [134] as a solution for safeguarding cryptographic keys. Secret sharing schemes can be used for any situation in which the access to an important resource has to be restricted. We mention here the case of opening bank vaults or launching a nuclear missile. In the first secret sharing schemes only the number of the participants in the reconstruction phase was important for recovering the secret. Such schemes have been referred to as threshold secret sharing schemes. There are secret sharing schemes that deal with more complex access structures than the threshold ones. We mention here the weighted threshold secret sharing schemes in which a positive weight is associated to each user and the secret can be reconstructed if and only if the sum of the weights of the