An Improved Secret Sharing Algorithm

Abstract

Secret sharing schemes are popularly used in mission-critical situations like the launch of missiles, opening of bank vaults, corporate secrets, start of war, key management and securing classified documents. In a (p,n) secret sharing scheme, any p –out-of-n participating members can reconstruct the original shared code but not less than p participating members can do so. In this paper, we present an improved algorithm for sharing secrets among shareholders in which the information to be shared is first compressed into a single integer number (code) and then shared among shareholders. The shareholders (p) must form a quorum to be able to reconstruct the original shared value. When a quorum is not formed, any combination of < p participants cannot reconstruct the shared code.