Something about all or nothing (transforms) (Q5929716)

All-or-nothing transforms were proposed by \textit{R. L. Rivest} [FSE 1997, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 1267, 210--218 (1997), entire collection Zbl 0901.68004] as a mode of operation for block ciphers. In this note the author studies transforms that are unconditionally secure as compared to the computationally secure schemes considered by Rivest. A simple construction for linear transforms is given, and some existence and non-existence results for general transforms are derived from a combinatorial characterization of these objects.