Simple and Efficient Secret Sharing Schemes for Sharing Data and Image

Abstract: Secret sharing is a new alternative for outsourcing data in a secure way.It avoids the need for time consuming encryption decryption process and also the complexity involved in key management.The data must also be protected from untrusted cloud service providers.Secret sharing based solution provides secure information dispersal by making shares of the original data and distribute them among different servers.Data from the threshold number of servers can be used to reconstruct the original data.It is often impractical to distribute data among large number of servers.We have to achieve a trade off between security and efficiency.An optimal choice is to use a $(2,3)$ or $(2,4)$ threshold secret sharing scheme, where the data are distributed as shares among three or four servers and shares from any two can be used to construct the original data.This provides both security,reliability and efficiency.We propose some efficient and easy to implement secret sharing schemes in this regard based on number theory and bitwise XOR.These schemes are also suitable for secure sharing of images.Secret image sharing based on Shamir's schemes are lossy and involves complicated Lagrange interpolation.So the proposed scheme can also be effectively utilized for lossless sharing of secret images.