Efficient block masking for counting-based secret sharing

doi:10.1080/01611194.2025.2584040

2025-11-01

PRE

Rana Alrawashdeh

Md. Mahfuzur Rahman *

Mahmood Khan Niazi

Mohammad Shorfuzzaman

DOI：10.1080/01611194.2025.2584040

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摘要

En 中文

Secret sharing scheme distribute the secret key among multiple participants to ensure the reliability of the key. A new version of secret sharing called counting-based secret sharing (CBSS) has emerged to divide the secret key into multiple shares (copies of the secret key with some modifications) and distribute these key shares among several individuals in such a way that only the authorized subset of participants needs to agree together to reconstruct the original secret key. Existing CBSS schemes suffer from heavy computational and storage requirements for generating the key shares and reconstructing the secret key, and are also vulnerable to share leakage. This research overcomes the challenges that appear in the existing CBSS methods by dividing the secret key into adjacent blocks and by generating ambiguous secret shares based on block-based masking. In this approach, the secret shares are generated by XOR-ing each separate block of the secret key with a specific sequence of 1s where the total number of 1 is determined based on the block size. Our proposed approach can also reconstruct the secret key efficiently by assembling a subset of shares following a threshold (minimum number of secret shares that are able to reconstruct the secret key). Through experimentation, we found that our proposed CBSS strategy offers a remarkably secure contribution in making a tradeoff between security and cost of computation. Our experiment results also suggest that the average similarity between the secret key and secret shares decreases and the security level increases, when the block size of the secret key in our proposed strategy increases.

Keyword:

Counting-based secret sharing

information security

key management