Multipartite secret sharing schemes are those having a multipartite access structure, in which the set of participants is divided into several parts and all participants in the same part play an equivalent role. In this work, the characterization of ideal multipartite access structures is studied with all generality. Our results are based on the well-known connections between ideal secret sharing schemes and matroids and on the introduction of a new combinatorial tool in secret sharing, integer polymatroids.Our results can be summarized as follows. First, we present a characterization of multipartite matroid ports in terms of integer polymatroids. As a consequence of this characterization, a necessary condition for a multipartite access structure to be ideal is obtained. Second, we use representations of integer polymatroids by collections of vector subspaces to characterize the representable multipartite matroids. In this way we obtain a sufficient condition for a multipartite access structure to be ideal, and also a unified framework to study the open problems about the efficiency of the constructions of ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes. Finally, we apply our general results to obtain a complete characterization of ideal tripartite access structures, which was until now an open problem.

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Hierarchical secret sharing is among the most natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing, and it has attracted a lot of attention since the invention of secret sharing until nowadays. Several constructions of ideal hierarchical secret sharing schemes have been proposed, but it was not known what access structures admit such a scheme. We solve this problem by providing a natural definition for the family of the hierarchical access structures and, more importantly, by presenting a complete characterization of the ideal hierarchical access structures, that is, the ones admitting an ideal secret sharing scheme. Our characterization is based on the well known connection between ideal secret sharing schemes and matroids and, more specifically, on the connection between ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes and integer polymatroids. In particular, we prove that every hierarchical matroid port admits an ideal linear secret sharing scheme over every large enough finite field. Finally, we use our results to present a new proof for the existing characterization of the ideal weighted threshold access structures.

Abstract-We present new families of access structures that, similarly to the multilevel and compartmented access structures introduced in previous works, are natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing. Namely, they admit an ideal linear secret sharing schemes over every large enough finite field, they can be described by a small number of parameters, and they have useful properties for the applications of secret sharing. The use of integer polymatroids makes it possible to find many new such families and it simplifies in great measure the proofs for the existence of ideal secret sharing schemes for them.

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