Secret sharing with extended coefficient use for improved data capacity

Abstract

Secret sharing is a well-known method to distribute a secret amongst a group of participants whereas each of them holds a share of the secret. If a number of such shares are collected, the original secret will be retrieved. Since these shares look different from the secret itself, data security is accomplished. However, Shamir's secret sharing scheme imposes one potential restriction: the secret size should not be too big. To eliminate this scalability obstacle, this paper intends to modify the Shamir's scheme and utilize multiple coefficients in polynomials so that secret sharing can be turned into data sharing for data management in distributed environments. Both security and reliability are achieved. Performance analysis and experimental results have demonstrated the revised scheme's effectiveness.