arXiv subjects

Laszlo Csirmaz

Publications and source records attributed to Laszlo Csirmaz.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Book inequalities

Information theoretical inequalities have strong ties with polymatroids and their representability. A polymatroid is entropic if its rank function is given by the Shannon entropy of the subsets of some discrete random variables. The book is a special iterated adhesive extension of a polymatroid with the property that entropic polymatroids have $n$-page book extensions over an arbitrary spine. We prove that every polymatroid has an $n$-page book extension over a single element and over an all-but-one-element spine. Consequently, for polymatroids on four elements, only book extensions over a two-element spine should be considered. F. Matúš proved that the Zhang-Yeung inequalities characterize polymatroids on four elements which have such a 2-page book extension. The $n$-page book inequalities, defined in this paper, are conjectured to characterize polymatroids on four elements which have $n$-page book extensions over a two-element spine. We prove that the condition is necessary; consequently every book inequality is an information inequality on four random variables. Using computer-aided multiobjective optimization, the sufficiency of the condition is verified up to 9-page book extensions.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

On-line secret sharing

In an on-line secret sharing scheme the dealer assigns shares in the order the participants show up, knowing only those qualified subsets whose all members she has seen. We assume that the overall access structure is known and only the order of the participants is unknown. On-line secret sharing is a useful primitive when the set of participants grows in time, and redistributing the secret is too expensive. In this paper we start the investigation of unconditionally secure on-line secret sharing schemes. The complexity of a secret sharing scheme is the size of the largest share a single participant can receive over the size of the secret. The infimum of this amount in the on-line or off-line setting is the on-line or off-line complexity of the access structure, respectively. For paths on at most five vertices and cycles on at most six vertices the on-line and offline complexities are equal, while for other paths and cycles these values differ. We show that the gap between these values can be arbitrarily large even for graph based access structures. We present a general on-line secret sharing scheme that we call first-fit. Its complexity is the maximal degree of the access structure. We show, however, that this on-line scheme is never optimal: the on-line complexity is always strictly less than the maximal degree. On the other hand, we give examples where the first-fit scheme is almost optimal, namely, the on-line complexity can be arbitrarily close to the maximal degree. The performance ratio is the ratio of the on-line and off-line complexities of the same access structure. We show that for graphs the performance ratio is smaller than the number of vertices, and for an infinite family of graphs the performance ratio is at least constant times the square root of the number of vertices.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Using multiobjective optimization to map the entropy region of four random variables

Presently the only available method of exploring the 15-dimensional entropy region formed by the entropies of four random variables is the one of Zhang and Yeung from 1998. It is argued that their method is equivalent to solving linear multiobjective optimization problems. Benson's outer approximation algorithm is a fundamental tool for solving these optimization problems. An improved version of Benson's algorithm is described which requires solving one scalar linear program in each iteration rather than two or three as in previous versions. During the algorithm design special care was taken for numerical stability. The implemented algorithm was used to check previous statements about the entropy region, and to gain new information on that region. The experimental results demonstrate the viability of the method for determining the extremal set of medium size, numerically ill-posed optimization problems. With growing problem size two limitations of Benson's algorithm have been observed: the inefficiency of the scalar LP solver on one hand and the unexpectedly large number of intermediate vertices on the other.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2013

Gruppen secret sharing, or, how to share several secrets if you must?

Each member of an $n$-person team has a secret, say a password. The $k$ out of $n$ gruppen secret sharing requires that any group of $k$ members should be able to recover the secrets of the other $n-k$ members, while any group of $k-1$ or less members should have no information on the secret of other team member even if other secrets leak out. We prove that when all secrets are chosen independently and have size $s$, then each team member must have a share of size at least $(n-k)s$, and we present a scheme which achieves this bound when $s$ is large enough. This result shows a significant saving over $n$ independent applications of Shamir's $k$ out of $n-1$ threshold schemes which assigns shares of size $(n-1)s$ to each team member independently of $k$. We also show how to set up such a scheme without any trusted dealer, and how the secrets can be recovered, possibly multiple times, without leaking information. We also discuss how our scheme fits to the much-investigated multiple secret sharing methods.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2013

Secret sharing on the $d$-dimensional cube

We prove that for $d>1$ the best information ratio of the perfect secret sharing scheme based on the edge set of the $d$-dimensional cube is exactly $d/2$. Using the technique developed, we also prove that the information ratio of the infinite $d$-dimensional lattice is $d$.

cs.CR↗