Paper 2026/388 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/388 ↗

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for the Existence of Ideal Linear Secret Sharing Schemes for Arbitrary Access Structures

Abstract

Determining whether an arbitrary access structure can be realized by an ideal linear secret sharing scheme is an important research topic. we use linear codes as the main tool to construct matrices $H$ and $G$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ for a given access structure $\Gamma_{\min}$, and show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an ideal linear secret sharing scheme realizing $\Gamma_{\min}$ is that the equation $GH^{\mathsf{T}}=0$ has a solution. If this equation has a solution, then $H$ serves as the parity-check matrix of a linear code that realizes $\Gamma_{\min}$, and $G$ is the corresponding generator matrix. Furthermore, we prove that the result is equivalent to the following statement: there exists an ideal linear code for realizing the $\Gamma_{\min}$ if and only if it is the port of a matroid that is representable over $\mathbb{F}_q$.