Reliable Secret Key Generation For Counting-Based Secret Sharing

Secret sharing scheme is becoming famous for increasing the security to access sensitive information for applications and resources that have to be protected by more than one person. It divides the secret key into shares, distributed to participants such that only subsets of participants can reconstruct the secret key. This paper adopts counting-based secret sharing scheme as a promising secret sharing technique presented recently. This counting-based method works on constructing shares by changing one or two 0-bits within the secret key to one at different locations for producing needed shares. The combination of selected shares is counting the ones in parallel to recover the secret key. This paper proposed improving the reliability of this counting-based secret sharing scheme by increasing the size of the secret key to 64-bits as realistically needed by most applications. The work also improved the security of the secret key affecting its shares by adjusting the generation algorithm to involve applicable statistical randomness tests from NIST 800-22 standard where any unreliable secret key is regenerated again whenever needed. The proposal is implemented and compared with the original scheme via Java platform modeling showing interesting practical remarks providing remarkable contributions.