Improving Counting-Based Secret Sharing Technique for Practical Performance and Remembrance

Abstract

Information security is an area of attention to protect data against infringing uses and prevent unauthorized access. It involves different techniques for protecting sensitive data such as cryptography, steganography. The secret sharing technique is used in cryptography to ensure secure access to information. This thesis focuses on the Counting-based secret sharing technique is a new and simplest secret sharing technique that is developed for multimedia applications and depends on multiple shared keys. Counting-based secret sharing scheme faced some security and efficiency challenges which occur when the target key has a small size, which affects the security as well as making limitations within the number of generated shares, limiting the number of participants. Furthermore, shares keys contain only zeros and ones, making it difficult to remember the key by the participant. This work introduces a new algorithm to increase the number of shares by increasing the size of the target key to generate an unlimited number of shares. Also, this work proposes to add additional zeros within TKs proposed via seven algorithms to increase the number of shares. For shares remembrance, this work introduces a new steganography algorithm for hiding shares inside an image. We expanded the size of the target key by repeating its value for the first enhancement. The study further added sequential zeros algorithms and separated zeros algorithms for second enhancement. For steganography, work proposes LSB redistribution, in which the hiding locations differ each time. The randomness of the shares and target keys adjusted were all measured to select the reliable TK based on NIST 800-22 standard test applied to different target keys sizes such as 16-bits and 64bits. The study introduced an analysis to show the stego-image quality and security of the proposed method. The research shows interesting results as analysis and comparisons for each presented improvement for increasing the number of shares in which present satisfactory results in terms of security. Also, the results explain that the proposed steganography method showed interesting practical performance and high payload capacity.