Inspired by social animals, such as ants, bees and fish, which appear to exhibit what has been dubbed 'swarm intelligence', swarm robotic systems aim to accomplish goals that are unachievable by an individual robot. Swarm robotics have a large number of potential uses, including applications in the military, monitoring, disaster relief, healthcare and commercial applications. To be able to achieve their goals, it is of utmost importance that communications between agents are secure in the presence of possibly malicious interruptions and attacks from adversaries. The authors will discuss the issues surrounding the provision of secure communications in swarm robotics: what secure communications mean, how the characteristics of swarm robotics present a security challenge, the relationship between security issues for swarm robotics and other network technologies, and how different adversarial models demand different types of solutions. It will then be discussed what the important open research questions are in secure communications in swarm robotics.

We consider repairable threshold schemes (RTSs), which are threshold schemes that enable a player to securely reconstruct a lost share with help from their peers. We summarise and, where possible, refine existing RTSs and introduce a new parameter for analysis, called the repair metric. We then explore using secure regenerating codes as RTSs and find them to be immediately applicable. We compare all RTS constructions considered and conclude by presenting the best candidate solutions for when either communication complexity or information rate is prioritised.

Abstract. In 2010, Resch and Plank proposed a computationally secure secret sharing scheme, called AONT-RS. We present a generalisation of their scheme and discuss two ways in which information is leaked if used to distribute small ciphertexts. We discuss how to prevent such leakage and provide a proof of computational privacy in the random oracle model. Next, we extend the scheme to be robust and prove the robust AONT-RS achieves computational privacy in the random oracle model and computational recoverability under standard assumptions. Finally, we compare the security, share size and complexity of the AONT-RS scheme with Krawczyk's SSMS scheme.

Abstract. We propose a new, lightweight (t, n)−threshold secret sharing scheme that can be implemented using only XOR operations. Our scheme is based on an idea extracted from a patent application by Hewlett Packard that utilises error correction codes. Our scheme improves on the patent by requiring fewer randomly generated bits and by reducing the size of shares given to each player, thereby making the scheme ideal. We provide a security proof and efficiency analysis. We compare our scheme to existing schemes in the literature and show that our scheme is more efficient than other schemes, especially when t is large.

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