Access Structures Determined by Uniform Polymatroids

An access structure is said to be multipartite, if the set of participants is divided into several parts and all participants in the same part play an equivalent role. The search for ideal secret sharing schemes for some special interesting families of multipartite access structures, has been carried out by many authors. In this paper a new concept of study of ideal access structures is proposed. We do not consider special classes of access structures defined by imposing certain prescribed assumptions, but we investigate all access structures obtained from uniform polymatroids using the method developed by Farràs, Martí-Farré and Padró. They satisfy necessary condition to be ideal, i.e., they are matroid ports. Moreover some objects in this family can be useful for the applications of secret sharing. The choice of uniform polymatroids is motivated by the fact that each such polymatroid defines ideal access structures. The method presented in this article is universal and can be continued with other classes of polymatroids in further similar studies. Here we are especially interested in hierarchy of participants determined by the access structure and we distinguish two main classes: they are compartmented and hierarchical access structures. The vast majority of papers discussing hierarchical access structures consider access structures which are compartment or totally hierarchical. The main results are summarized in Section 4, which presents situations where partial hierarchy properties may arise. In particular, hierarchical orders of obtained structures are described. It is surprising, that the hierarchical orders of access structures obtained from uniform polymatroids are flat, i.e., every chain has at most 2 elements. The ideality of some families of hierarchical access structures is proved in Section 5.