Mosaics of combinatorial designs for information-theoretic security

We study security functions which can serve to establish semantic security for the two central problems of information-theoretic security: the wiretap channel, and privacy amplification in secret key generation. The security functions are functional forms of mosaics of combinatorial designs, more precisely, of group divisible designs and balanced incomplete block designs. Every member is associated with a unique color, and each color corresponds to a unique message or key value. Since the application of such security functions requires a public seed shared between the two trusted communicating parties, we want to minimize the seed set given by the common block index set of the designs in the mosaic. We give explicit examples which have an optimal or nearly optimal trade-off of seed length versus color (i.e., message or key) rate. We also derive bounds for the security performance of security functions given by functional forms of mosaics of designs.