Natural Generalizations of Threshold Secret Sharing

We present new families of access structures that, similarly to the multilevel and compartmented access structures introduced in previous works, are natural generalizations of threshold secret sharing. Namely, they admit ideal linear secret sharing schemes over every large enough finite field, they can be described by a small number of parameters, and they have useful properties for the applications of secret sharing. The use of integer polymatroids makes it possible to find many new such families and it simplifies in great measure the proofs for the existence of ideal secret sharing schemes for them.