On the size of shares for secret sharing schemes

A secret sharing scheme permits a secret to be shared among participants in such a way that only qualified subsets of participants can recover the secret, but any nonqualified subset has absolutely no information on the secret. The set of all qualified subsets defines the access structure to the secret. Sharing schemes are useful in the management of cryptographic keys and in multiparty secure protocols.We analyze the relationships among the entropies of the sample spaces from which the shares and the secret are chosen. We show that there are access structures with four participants for which any secret sharing scheme must give to a participant a share at least 50% greater than the secret size. This is the first proof that there exist access structures for which the best achievable information rate (i.e., the ratio between the size of the secret and that of the largest share) is bounded away from 1. The bound is the best possible, as we construct a secret sharing scheme for the above access structures that meets the bound with equality.This work was partially supported by Algoritmi, Modelli di Calcolo e Sistemi Informativi of M.U.R.S.T. and by Progetto Finalizzato Sistemi Informatici e Calcolo Parallelo of C.N.R. under Grant Number 91.00939.PF69.