Code Based Secret Sharing Schemes: Applied Combinatorial Coding Theory

Book excerpt: Secret sharing schemes form one of the most important topic in Cryptography. These protocols are used in many areas, applied mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering. A secret is divided into several pieces called shares. Each share is given to a user of the system. Each user has no information about the secret, but the secret can be retrieved by certain authorized coalition of users. This book is devoted to such schemes inspired by Coding Theory. The classical schemes of Shamir, Blakley, Massey are recalled. Survey is made of research in Combinatorial Coding Theory they trigerred, mostly self-dual codes, and minimal codes. Applications to engineering like image processing, and key management of MANETs are highlighted.