Unconditionally secure group authentication (Q1265236)

Group authentication model represents an extension of the classical authentication model where the capability to authenticate a message is given to a group instead of a single person. That means only certain subsets of a set of potential transmitters (qualified groups) are capable to authenticate a message. An obvious approach to construct a group authentication scheme seems to be a simple combination of a secret sharing scheme and an authentication scheme. However, such direct combination suffers from the fact that members of a qualified group after combining their shares get also complete knowledge of the underlying secret. In the paper the problem is solved by more careful combination of existing secret sharing scheme with authentication schemes in such a way that members of a qualified group gets only little information about the secret. First, key notions of authentication and secret sharing are briefly introduced followed by the definition of unconditionally secure group authentication (USGA) schemes. Next it is shown how an USGA scheme can be constructed using linear constructions of perfect secret sharing schemes based on a matrix approach. Finally it is shown how maximum rank distance codes can be used for constructing an USGA scheme. Ideas described there are then illustrated by an example of a construction of a threshold authentication scheme that combines Shamir's threshold scheme together with maximum rank distance codes.