Multi-Level Secret Sharing Scheme for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In this paper the authors present a new multilevel secret sharing scheme by extending the Shamir's to the case that the global threshold is strictly greater than the sum of the compartment thresholds and we indicate how to use the threshold secret sharing schemes based on polynomial interpolation. These schemes are based on one-way functions (Discrete Logarithm) which are computationally perfect. In the first scheme the number of public shares grows exponentially with the number of participants. To overcome this disadvantage the authors proposed two efficient schemes, in which the number of public shares ate linearly proportional to the number of participants. Both these schemes are similar except that in the third scheme the identities of the participants are also hidden. In this, they also addressed the problem of malicious shareholders that aim to corrupt a secret sharing scheme. To prevent such a threat, legitimate shareholders must detect any modification of shares that has not been issued by a node responsible for the sharing of secret.