One-way cross-trees and their applications

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of efficiently generating a sequence of secrets with the special property that the knowledge of one or several secrets does not help an adversary to find the other ones. This is achieved through one-way cross-trees, which may be seen as a multidimensional extension of the so-called one-way chains. In a dual way, some applications require the release of one or several secrets; oneway cross-trees allow to minimize the amount of data necessary to recover those secrets and only those ones.