Skew-representable matroids form a fundamental class in matroid theory, bridging combinatorics and linear algebra. They play an important role in areas such as coding theory, optimization, and combinatorial geometry, where linear structure is crucial for both theoretical insights and algorithmic applications. Since deciding skew-representability is computationally intractable, much effort has been focused on identifying necessary or sufficient conditions for a matroid to be skew-representable.

We discuss several extension properties of matroids and polymatroids and their application as necessary conditions for the existence of different matroid representations, namely linear, folded linear, algebraic, and entropic representations. Iterations of those extension properties are checked for matroids on eight and nine elements by means of computer-aided explorations, finding in that way several new examples of non-linearly representable matroids. A special emphasis is made on sparse paving matroids on nine points containing the tic-tac-toe configuration. We present a new, more clear description of that family and we analyze extension properties on those matroids and their duals.

We present a new improvement in the linear programming technique to derive lower bounds on the information ratio of secret sharing schemes. We obtain non-Shannon-type bounds without using information inequalities explicitly. Our new technique makes it possible to determine the optimal information ratio of linear secret sharing schemes for all access structures on 5 participants and all graph-based access structures on 6 participants. In addition, new lower bounds are presented also for some small matroid ports and, in particular, the optimal information ratios of the linear secret sharing schemes for the ports of the Vamos matroid are determined.

Beimel and Orlov proved that all information inequalities on four or five variables, together with all information inequalities on more than five variables that are known to date, provide lower bounds on the size of the shares in secret sharing schemes that are at most linear on the number of participants. We present here another two negative results about the power of information inequalities in the search for lower bounds in secret sharing. First, we prove that all information inequalities on a bounded number of variables can only provide lower bounds that are polynomial on the number of participants. Second, we prove that the rank inequalities that are derived from the existence of two common informations can provide only lower bounds that are at most cubic in the number of participants.

Multiplicative linear secret sharing is a fundamental notion in the area of secure multiparty computation and, since recently, in the area of two-party cryptography as well. In a nutshell, this notion guarantees that the product of two secrets is obtained as a linear function of the vector consisting of the coordinatewise product of two respective share-vectors. This paper focuses on the following foundational question, which is novel to the best of our knowledge. Suppose we abandon the latter linearity condition and instead require that this product is obtained by some, not-necessarily-linear “product reconstruction function.” Is the resulting notion equivalent to multiplicative linear secret sharing? We show the (perhaps somewhat counterintuitive) result that this relaxed notion is strictly more general. Concretely, fix a finite field ${\mathbb F}_q$ as the base field over which linear secret sharing is considered. Then we show there exists an (exotic) linear secret sharing scheme with an unbounded number of players $n$ such that it has $t$-privacy with $t = \Omega(n)$ and such that it does admit a product reconstruction function, yet this function is necessarily nonlinear. In addition, we determine the minimum number of players for which those exotic schemes exist. Our proof is based on combinatorial arguments involving quadratic forms. It extends to similar separation results for important variations, such as strongly multiplicative secret sharing.

We present new families of access structures that, similarly to the multilevel and compartmented access structures introduced in previous works, are natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing. Namely, they admit ideal linear secret sharing schemes over every large enough finite field, they can be described by a small number of parameters, and they have useful properties for the applications of secret sharing. The use of integer polymatroids makes it possible to find many new such families and it simplifies in great measure the proofs for the existence of ideal secret sharing schemes for them.

Every biuniform matroid is representable over all sufficiently large fields. But it is not known exactly over which finite fields they are representable, and the existence of efficient methods to find a representation for every given biuniform matroid has not been proved. The interest of these problems is due to their implications to secret sharing. The existence of efficient methods to find representations for all biuniform matroids is proved here for the first time. The previously known efficient constructions apply only to a particular class of biuniform matroids, while the known general constructions were not proved to be efficient. In addition, our constructions provide in many cases representations over smaller finite fields.

Hierarchical secret sharing is among the most natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing, and it has attracted a lot of attention since the invention of secret sharing until nowadays. Several constructions of ideal hierarchical secret sharing schemes have been proposed, but it was not known what access structures admit such a scheme. We solve this problem by providing a natural definition for the family of the hierarchical access structures and, more importantly, by presenting a complete characterization of the ideal hierarchical access structures, that is, the ones admitting an ideal secret sharing scheme. Our characterization is based on the well-known connection between ideal secret sharing schemes and matroids and, more specifically, on the connection between ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes and integer polymatroids. In particular, we prove that every hierarchical matroid port admits an ideal linear secret sharing scheme over every large enough finite field. Finally, we use our results to present a new proof for the existing characterization of the ideal weighted threshold access structures.

Error-correcting codes and matroids have been widely used in the study of ordinary secret sharing schemes. In this paper, the connections between codes, matroids, and a special class of secret sharing schemes, namely, multiplicative linear secret sharing schemes (LSSSs), are studied. Such schemes are known to enable multiparty computation protocols secure against general (nonthreshold) adversaries. Two open problems related to the complexity of multiplicative LSSSs are considered in this paper. The first one deals with strongly multiplicative LSSSs. As opposed to the case of multiplicative LSSSs, it is not known whether there is an efficient method to transform an LSSS into a strongly multiplicative LSSS for the same access structure with a polynomial increase of the complexity. A property of strongly multiplicative LSSSs that could be useful in solving this problem is proved. Namely, using a suitable generalization of the well-known Berlekamp-Welch decoder, it is shown that all strongly multiplicative LSSSs enable efficient reconstruction of a shared secret in the presence of malicious faults. The second one is to characterize the access structures of ideal multiplicative LSSSs. Specifically, the considered open problem is to determine whether all self-dual vector space access structures are in this situation. By the aforementioned connection, this in fact constitutes an open problem about matroid theory, since it can be restated in terms of representability of identically self-dual matroids by self-dual codes. A new concept is introduced, the flat-partition, that provides a useful classification of identically self-dual matroids. Uniform identically self-dual matroids, which are known to be representable by self-dual codes, form one of the classes. It is proved that this property also holds for the family of matroids that, in a natural way, is the next class in the above classification: the identically self-dual bipartite matroids.

The matroid associated with a linear code is the representable matroid that is defined by the columns of any generator matrix. The matroid associated with a self‐dual code is identically self‐dual, but it is not known whether every identically self‐dual representable matroid can be represented by a self‐dual code. This open problem was proposed in [R. Cramer et al., Advances in Cryptology, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 3621, Springer, New York, 2005, pp. 327–343], where it was proved to be equivalent to an open problem on the complexity of multiplicative linear secret sharing schemes. Some contributions to its solution are given in this paper. A new family of identically self‐dual matroids that can be represented by self‐dual codes is presented. Additionally, we prove that every identically self‐dual matroid on at most eight points is representable by a self‐dual code.

Abstract The partial line digraph technique was introduced in [7] in order to construct digraphs with a minimum diameter, maximum connectivity, and good expandability. To find a new method to construct directed hypergraphs with a minimum diameter, we present in this paper an adaptation of that technique to directed hypergraphs. Directed hypergraphs are used as models for interconnection networks whose vertices are linked by directed buses. The connectivity and expandability of partial line directed hypergraphs are studied. Besides, we prove a conjecture by J‐C. Bermond and F. Ergincan about the characterization of line directed hypergraphs. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We study the information rate of secret sharing schemes whose access structure is bipartite. In a bipartite access structure there are two classes of participants and all participants in the same class play an equivalent role in the structure. We characterize completely the bipartite access structures that can be realized by an ideal secret sharing scheme. Both upper and lower bounds on the optimal information rate of bipartite access structures are given. These results are applied to the particular case of weighted threshold access structure with two weights.

The purpose of this paper is to find fault-tolerant fixed routings in some families of digraphs that have been widely considered into the design of interconnection networks. A routing $\rho$ in a digraph G assigns to each pair of vertices a fixed path (called a route) between them. For a given set of faulty vertices and/or arcs, the vertices of the surviving route digraph are the nonfaulty vertices and there is an arc between two vertices if and only if there are no faults on the route between them. The diameter of the surviving route digraph measures the fault tolerance of the routing. In this work, sufficient conditions are found for a digraph to have a routing such that for any set of faults with a bounded number of elements the diameter of the surviving route digraph is at most 3. These results are applied to prove the existence of routings with this property in the generalized de Bruijn and Kautz digraphs, the bipartite digraphs BD(d,n), and general iterated line digraphs.

The aim of this note is to present some counterexamples to the results in the paper by Du, Lyuu, and Hsu (see ibid., vol.42, no.5, p.612-16, May 1993).