Hierarchical Threshold Secret Sharing

We consider the problem of threshold secret sharing in groups with hierarchical structure. In such settings, the secret is shared among a group of participants that is partitioned into levels. The access structure is then determined by a sequence of threshold requirements: a subset of participants is authorized if it has at least k0 members from the highest level, as well as at least k1 > k0 members from the two highest levels and so forth. Such problems may occur in settings where the participants differ in their authority or level of confidence and the presence of higher level participants is imperative to allow the recovery of the common secret. Even though secret sharing in hierarchical groups has been studied extensively in the past, none of the existing solutions addresses the simple setting where, say, a bank transfer should be signed by three employees, at least one of whom must be a department manager. We present a perfect secret sharing scheme for this problem that, unli...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: TCC
• Authors: Tamir Tassa
• Keywords: Cryptography, Secret Sharing, Secret Sharing Schemes, TCC 2004, Threshold Secret Sharing