Title: Optimized Implementation of a General Secret Sharing

1. Seminar Announcement June 4, Wednesday, 9:30-11:00am, Room 光电国家实验室A302 Title: Optimized Implementation of a General Secret Sharing (for audiences with security background) Prof. Lein Harn School of Computer and EngineeringUniversity of Missouri-Kansas City, USA Abstract Secret sharing is one of most popular cryptographic tools which has been proposed originally in 1979. Shamir’s threshold secret sharing is the most popular scheme in the literature. But, Shamir’s scheme has a special secret access structure in which (a) any t (i.e., the “threshold”) or more than t shareholders can recover the secret and (b) fewer than t shareholders cannot recover the secret. A general secret sharing has more general secret access structure in which (a) any “qualified subset” of shareholders can recover the secret and (b) any “unqualified subset” of shareholders cannot recover the secret. Most papers on general secret sharing in literature contain only theoretical discussion. In this talk, I will introduce my recent paper to propose a complete implementation of a general secret sharing. We use Boolean logic to characterize a general secret access structure and derive the minimal positive secret access and the maximal negative secret access subsets. Then, we use these two subsets to determine parameters to implement a general secret sharing. Our design enables to select optimized parameters and is a general design. Biography Lein Harnreceived the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University in 1977, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York-Stony Brook in 1980, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1984. In 1984, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Missouri- Columbia as an assistant professor, and in 1986, he moved to Computer Science and Telecommunication Program (CSTP), University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC). While at UMKC, he went on development leave to work in Racal Data Group, Florida for a year. His research interests include cryptography, network security, and wireless communication security. He has published a number of papers on digital signature design and applications and wireless and network security. He has written two books on security. He is currently investigating new ways of using secret sharing in various applications.