On the classification of ideal secret sharing schemes

In a secret sharing scheme a dealer has a secret key. There is a finite set P of participants and a set of subsets of P. A secret sharing scheme with as the access structure is a method which the dealer can use to distribute shares to each participant so that a subset of participants can determine the key if and only if that subset is in . The share of a participant is the information sent by the dealer in private to the participant. A secret sharing scheme is ideal if any subset of participants who can use their shares to determine any information about the key can in fact actually determine the key, and if the set of possible shares is the same as the set of possible keys. In this paper we show a relationship between ideal secret sharing schemes and matroids.This work was performed at the Sandia National Laboratories and was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC04-76DP00789.