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No abstract uploaded!

In a (t,n) threshold scheme any t or more shares can reconstruct the secret s, but less than t shares reveal no information about s. However, an unauthenticated adversary can pretend to be the shareholder at the reconstruction stage. If there were more than t honest shareholders, the unauthenticated adversary without valid share can obtain the secret. To deal with this type of attacks, a model of (t,m,n) group oriented secret sharing (GOSS) scheme was proposed by Miao et al. in 2015. Here the group oriented property means that if m>t parties try to reconstruct the secret, they should all have the authentic shares in advance. It was claimed by Miao et al. that the group oriented property in their GOSS schemes holds in the information-theoretic sense. In this paper, we revisit two instantiations of (t,m,n) group oriented secret sharing schemes and show that these constructions cannot provide the so-called “group oriented property”. Specifically, we develop concrete attacks which allow an unauthenticated adversary with no valid share to participate in the reconstruction phase and obtain the secret provided that there are at least t honest shares presented at the reconstruction phase.

No abstract uploaded!

Knotted ribbons form an important topic in knot theory. They have applications in natural sciences, such as cyclic duplex DNA modeling. A flat knotted ribbon can be obtained by gently pulling a knotted ribbon tight so that it becomes flat and folded. An important problem in knot theory is to study the minimal ratio of length to width of a flat knotted ribbon. This minimal ratio is called the ribbonlength of the knot. It has been conjectured that the ribbonlength has an upper bound and a lower bound which are both linear in the crossing number of the knot. In the first part of the paper, we use grid diagrams to construct flat knotted ribbons and prove an explicit quadratic upper bound on the ribbonlength for all non-trivial knots. We then improve the quadratic upper bound to a linear upper bound for all non-trivial torus knots and twist knots. Our approach of using grid diagrams to study flat knotted ribbons is novel and can likely be used to obtain a linear upper bound for more general families of knots. In the second part of the paper, we obtain a sharper linear upper bound on the ribbonlength for nontrivial twist knots by constructing a flat knotted ribbon via folding the ribbon over itself multiple times to shorten the length.