Secret sharing schemes on sparse homogeneous access structures with rank three (Q1773182)

An access structure of a secret sharing scheme is said to be \(r\)-homogeneous if there are exactly \(r\) participants in every minimal qualifying set. In this paper the authors study ideal 3-homogeneous secret sharing schemes. They consider the family of so-called sparse 3-homogeneous access structures defined as 3-homogeneous access structures such that each set of four participants contains at most 2 minimal qualified sets. The main results in the paper are contained in the following two theorems. Theorem 4.1. Let \(\Gamma\) be a 3-homogeneous access structure on a set of participants \({\mathcal P}\). Then the following conditions are equivalent: (1) \(\Gamma\) is a \(Z_2\)-vector space access structure; (2) \(\Gamma\) is sparse and has optimal information rate \(\rho^*(\Gamma)>2/3\). Theorem 4.2. Let \(\Gamma\) be a sparse 3-homogeneous access structure on a set of participants \({\mathcal P}\). Then the following conditions are equivalent: (1) \(\Gamma\) is a vector space access structure. (2) \(\Gamma\) is an ideal access structure. (3) \(\rho^*(\Gamma)>2/3\). (4) Every simple component of \(\Gamma\) is either an access structure \(\Gamma\langle S(p)\rangle\) defined by a 3-homogeneous star, or the access structure associated to the Fano plane \(\Gamma_2\), or its related access structure \(\Gamma_{2,1}\).