Rectangular, range, and restricted AONTs: Three generalizations of all-or-nothing transforms

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>All-or-nothing transforms (AONTs) were originally defined by Rivest [<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="b14">14</xref>] as bijections from <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ s $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> input blocks to <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$ s $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> output blocks such that no information can be obtained about any input block in the absence of any output block. Numerous generalizations and extensions of all-or-nothing transforms have been discussed in recent years, many of which are motivated by diverse applications in cryptography, information security, secure distributed storage, etc. In particular, <inline-formula><tex-math id="M3">\begin{document}$ t $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-AONTs, in which no information can be obtained about any <inline-formula><tex-math id="M4">\begin{document}$ t $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> input blocks in the absence of any <inline-formula><tex-math id="M5">\begin{document}$ t $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> output blocks, have received considerable study.</p><p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, we study three generalizations of AONTs that are motivated by applications due to Pham et al. [<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="b13">13</xref>] and Oliveira et al. [<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="b12">12</xref>]. We term these generalizations rectangular, range, and restricted AONTs. Briefly, in a rectangular AONT, the number of outputs is greater than the number of inputs. A range AONT satisfies the <inline-formula><tex-math id="M6">\begin{document}$ t $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-AONT property for a range of consecutive values of <inline-formula><tex-math id="M7">\begin{document}$ t $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. Finally, in a restricted AONT, the unknown outputs are assumed to occur within a specified set of "secure" output blocks. We study existence and non-existence and provide examples and constructions for these generalizations. We also demonstrate interesting connections with combinatorial structures such as orthogonal arrays, split orthogonal arrays, MDS codes and difference matrices.</p>