Secret swarm unit: Reactive k-secret sharing

Secret sharing is a fundamental cryptographic task. Motivated by the virtual automata abstraction and swarm computing, we investigate an extension of the k-secret sharing scheme, in which the secret shares are changed on the fly, independently and without (internal) communication, as a reaction to a global external trigger. The changes are made while maintaining the requirement that k or more secret shares may reconstruct the secret and no k − 1 or fewer can do so. The application considered is a swarm of mobile processes, each maintaining a share of the secret which may change according to common outside inputs, e.g., inputs received by sensors attached to the process. The proposed schemes support addition and removal of processes from the swarm, as well as corruption of a small portion of the processes in the swarm.