This is more a hybrid "physicist writes a cryptography/graph-theory paper".
This paper takes secret sharing as a black box and asks the question: once you have your N shares, where on a network should you put them?
The author's claim is that placement is a first-class security parameter, not an implementation detail, because both recoverability and exposure depend on the topology of who holds what.
It's not a cryptography paper, the threat model is very weak by cryptographic standards — e.g. random compromise rather than adaptive or targeted adversaries, no correlation between hacking a vertex and its neighbors (the author flags this extension as realistic but out of scope), and only N-of-N (not M-of-N as one might expect) reconstruction.
I read it as a foundational framing paper that connects share placement to network reliability theory and statistical physics.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadThis paper takes secret sharing as a black box and asks the question: once you have your N shares, where on a network should you put them?
The author's claim is that placement is a first-class security parameter, not an implementation detail, because both recoverability and exposure depend on the topology of who holds what.
It's not a cryptography paper, the threat model is very weak by cryptographic standards — e.g. random compromise rather than adaptive or targeted adversaries, no correlation between hacking a vertex and its neighbors (the author flags this extension as realistic but out of scope), and only N-of-N (not M-of-N as one might expect) reconstruction.
I read it as a foundational framing paper that connects share placement to network reliability theory and statistical physics.