Secret sharing: A comprehensive survey, taxonomy and applications

Abstract

The emergence of ubiquitous computing and different disruptive technologies caused magnificent development in information and communication technology. Likewise, cybercriminals are also carefully considering different newer ways of attacks. Protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of sensitive information is the day’s major challenge. Secret sharing is a method that allows a trusted authority (the dealer) to distribute a secret or a number of secrets among some target participants with the intention that certain predetermined groups of participants can collaborate to recover the secret or secrets. Any other group formed by the participants cannot do so. Threshold secret sharing (TSS) is a particular form of secret sharing. It permits any group consisting of at least a specific number (called the threshold) of participants to reconstruct the secret or secrets. However, any group with fewer than the specified number of participants is forbidden to do so. It provides tolerance against single point of failure (SPOF), which has attracted a large number of researchers to contribute in this field. It has the potential to be implemented in numerous practical and secure applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of a variety of existing threshold secret sharing schemes. We have identified various aspects of developing secure and efficient secret sharing schemes. We have also highlighted some of the applications based on secret sharing. Finally, the open challenges and future research directions in the field of secret sharing are identified and discussed.