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In order to protect a secret key K from any possible destruction, loss or theft, the notion of "shared cryptography" was initiated in 1979 through the first secret sharing system presented by Adi Shamir. A secret sharing scheme is a method that allows to share confidential information K between several people, called "participants", so that no participant fully possesses the secret and only predefined subsets of participants can recover the secret after collaborating with their secret shares.
The construction of secret sharing schemes has received a considerable attention of many researchers whose main goal was to improve performance. Inspired by the hierarchical concept existing in a company and which is illustrated through its organizational chart, we are interested in this paper to present a new hierarchical secret sharing scheme, which is at the same time simple and secure. In order to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we analyzed all the possible types of attacks in order to verify that the security is ensured. In the end, we presented a detailed didactic example for the application of the proposed scheme within a small company.
