An Explication of Secret Sharing Schemes with General Access Structure

The basic idea in secret sharing is to divide the secret key into pieces, also called as ‘shares’ and distribute the pieces to different persons so that certain subsets of the persons can get together to recover the key. In the outline of threshold schemes, we wanted k out of n participants to be able to determine the key. In practice, it is often needed that only certain specified subsets of the participants should be able to recover the secret. A more general situation is to specify exactly which subsets of participants should be able to determine the key and those that should not. The Access structure describes all the authorized subsets to design the access structure with required capabilities. The goal of the general access structure secret sharing scheme is to provide the flexibility to decide which specified subsets of participants will able to reconstruct the original secret and which subsets cannot. The intent of this paper is to provide an analysis of some existing General Access Structure Secret Sharing Schemes. The comparative study shows there is a need of better General Access Structure scheme to fulfil the need of applications.