Optimal information rate of secret sharing schemes on trees
This solves a specific problem in cryptography for designing efficient secret sharing schemes on tree structures, but it is incremental as it builds on known graph-theoretic concepts.
The paper determines the optimal information rate for secret sharing schemes on trees, showing it equals 1/(2-1/c), where c is the size of the largest core of the tree, by establishing matching lower and upper bounds.
The information rate for an access structure is the reciprocal of the load of the optimal secret sharing scheme for this structure. We determine this value for all trees: it is 1/(2-1/c), where c is the size of the largest core of the tree. A subset of the vertices of a tree is a core if it induces a connected subgraph and for each vertex in the subset one finds a neighbor outside the subset. Our result follows from a lower and an upper bound on the information rate that applies for any graph and happen to coincide for trees because of a correspondence between the size of the largest core and a quantity related to a fractional cover of the tree with stars.