Secret Share Dissemination across a Network

Secret sharing is an important component of several cryptographic protocols. These include protocols for secure multiparty function computation, key management, and secure archival storage. Most protocols assume that the dealer has direct communication links with every participant, in which case, the dealer can directly communicate the respective shares to all participants. In this paper, we consider the problem of disseminating shares of a secret when the dealer and the participants form a general network. We provide an algorithm for secret share dissemination that is communication-efficient, distributed and deterministic. Interestingly, the solution constitutes an instance of a network coding problem admitting a distributed and deterministic solution, and furthermore, handles the case of nodal-eavesdropping, about which very little appears to be known in the literature.