An ideal hierarchical secret sharing scheme

Abstract

One of the methods used in order to protect a secret K is a secret sharing scheme. In this scheme the secret K is distributed among a finite set of participants P by a special participant called the dealer, in such a way that only predefined subsets of participants can recover the secret after collaborating with their secret shares. The construction of secret sharing schemes has received a considerable attention of many searchers whose main goal was to improve the information rate. In this paper, we propose a novel construction of a secret sharing scheme which is based on the hierarchical concept of companies illustrated through its organization chart and represented by a tree. We proof that the proposed scheme is ideal by showing that the information rate equals 1. In order to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we discuss all possible kinds of attacks and proof that the security in ensured. Finally, we include a detailed didactic example for a small company organization chart.