Multiplicative codes of Reed-Muller type

This is a comprehensive study of multiplicative codes of Reed-Muller type and their applications. Our codes apply to the elds of cryptography and coding theory, especially to multiparty computa- tion and secret sharing schemes. We also study the AB method to analyze the minimum distance of linear codes. The multiplicative codes of Reed-Muller type and the AB method are connected when we study the distance and dual distance of a code and its square. Generator matrices for our codes use a combination of blocks, where a block consists of all columns of a given weight. Several interesting linear codes, which are best known linear codes for a given length and dimension, can be constructed in this way.