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Secret Sharing Schemes

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

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Synonyms

SSS

Related Concepts

Access Structure; Shamir’s Threshold Scheme; Threshold Cryptography; Visual Secret Sharing Scheme

Definition

A secret sharing scheme makes it possible to share a secret among a group of people in such a way that only well-defined combinations of people can recover the secret.

Background

Informally speaking, a secret sharing scheme (SSS, for short) allows one to share a secret among n participants in a such a way that some sets of participants called allowed coalitions can recover the secret exactly, while any other sets of participants (non-allowed coalitions) cannot get any additional (i.e., a posteriori) information about the possible value of the secret. The SSS with the last property is called perfect. The set Γ of all allowed coalitions is called an access structure.

Theory

The history of SSS began in 1979 when this problem was introduced and partially solved by G.R. Blakley [1] and A. Shamir [2] for the case of (n, k)- threshold schemes, where the...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Blakley R (1979) Safeguarding cryptographic keys. In: Proceedings of AFIPS 1979 national computer conference, vol 48. New York, pp 313–317

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  3. Ito M, Saito A, Nishizeki T (1993) Multiple assignment scheme for sharing secret. J Cryptol 6:15–20

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M University, College Station, 77843-3368, TX, USA

    G. R. Blakley (Dr.) & Gregory Kabatiansky (Dr.)

Authors
  1. G. R. Blakley
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  2. Gregory Kabatiansky
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Henk C. A. van Tilborg

  2. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4422, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

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Blakley, G.R., Kabatiansky, G. (2011). Secret Sharing Schemes. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_389

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