Robust Secret Storage in Networks

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.