Minimal linear codes arising from blocking sets

Blocking sets, ovals, (k)-arcs (51E21) Authentication, digital signatures and secret sharing (94A62) Linear codes (general theory) (94B05) Geometric methods (including applications of algebraic geometry) applied to coding theory (94B27)

Abstract: Minimal linear codes are algebraic objects which gained interest in the last twenty years, due to their link with Massey's secret sharing schemes. In this context, Ashikhmin and Barg provided a useful and a quite easy to handle sufficient condition for a linear code to be minimal, which has been applied in the construction of many minimal linear codes. In this paper, we generalize some recent constructions of minimal linear codes which are not based on Ashikhmin-Barg's condition. More combinatorial and geometric methods are involved in our proofs. In particular, we present a family of codes arising from particular blocking sets, which are well-studied combinatorial objects. In this context, we will need to define cutting blocking sets and to prove some of their relations with other notions in blocking sets' theory. At the end of the paper, we provide one explicit family of cutting blocking sets and related minimal linear codes, showing that infinitely many of its members do not satisfy the Ashikhmin-Barg's condition.

Review text

A codeword of a linear code is called minimal if its support (the set of nonzero coordinates) does not contain the support of any other linearly independent codeword. For a linear code \(C\), the supports of minimal codewords of the dual code \(C^\bot\) give the access structure of a secret sharing scheme, introduced by Massey. The authors recall some results about blocking sets and introduce a new definition of cutting blocking set: An affine (respectively projective, respectively vectorial) \(k\)-blocking set is cutting if its intersection with every \((n-k)\)-dimensional affine (respectively projective, respectively affine through the origin) subspace is not contained in any other \((n-k)\)-dimensional affine (respectively projective, respectively affine through the origin) subspace. It is shown that a set \(B\) is a \(t\)-dimensional (with \(t>n-k\)) affine cutting \(k\)-blocking set if and only if the intersection between \(B\) and every \((n-k)\)-dimensional affine subspace is not contained in any other \((n-k)\)-dimensional affine subspace. A general construction of minimal linear codes related to blocking sets, both in affine and in projective case is provided. For every function \(f:\mathbb{F}_q^n\to\mathbb{F}_q\), the code \(C_f\) is defined as the set \(\{c(u,v)\}=\{uf(x)+v\cdot x\}\) for all \(u\in F_q\) and \(v\in\mathbb{F}_q^n\), \(x\in (\mathbb{F}_q^n)^\ast,\) where \(\cdot\) is the Euclidean inner product. The parameters of \(C_f\) are found for a nonlinear function \(f\) and its minimality is shown when the affine surface \(V(f)^\ast\) is an \(n\)-dimensional cutting vectorial \((1,n-1)\)-blocking set in \(\mathbb{A}(\mathbb{F}_n^q)\) and for every nonzero vector \(v,\) it exists \(x\) such that \(f(x)+v\cdot x=0\) and \(f(x)\) is different from 0. These results are extended to the projective space taking a nonzero vector from each one-dimensional subspace of \(\mathbb{F}_n^q.\) The last section presents an explicit family of minimal linear codes and it is proved that infinitely many of its members do not satisfy the Ashikhmin and Barg condition \(\cfrac{w_{\max}}{w_{\min}}\leq\cfrac{q}{q-1},\) where \(w_{\max}\) and \(w_{\min}\) are the maximum and minimum nonzero weights in \(C\), respectively.

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