How to Build Robust Shared Control Systems

Abstract

Previous researchers have designed shared control schemes with a view to minimising the likelihood that participants will conspire to perform an unauthorised act. But, human nature being what it is, systems inevitably fail; so shared control schemes should also be designed so that the police can identify conspirators after the fact. This requirement leads us to search for schemes with sparse access structures. We show how this can be done using ideas from coding theory. In particular, secret sharing schemes based on geometric codes whose dual [n, k, d] codes have d and n as their only nonzero weights are suitable. We determine their access structures and analyse their properties. We have found almost all of them, and established some relations among codes, designs and secret-sharing schemes.