Increasing Participants Using Counting-Based Secret Sharing via Involving Matrices and Practical Steganography

Secret sharing is an approach for accessing sensitive information by several authorized participants. It shares the secret key in different forms among several authorized participants, where a certain number of which is required to retrieve the original secret. This secret sharing raised a new practicality challenge of human secrecy memorization as well as limited number of users allowed, which have been addressed within this work. This paper examines two particular secret sharing techniques known as the counting-based secret sharing and the matrix-based secret sharing, which enhances the former to accommodate a high number of participants. This work aimed to serve participants accommodating the share's memorization challenge via image steganography as well as testing both schemes in the cases of original 1-bit and 2-bit methods. We compared practicality applying the secret sharing methods combined with two image steganography methods: the least significant bit and the discrete wavelet transform. Our findings included interesting remarks regarding both security and robustness. Our results demonstrated that despite the large number of shares generated, as to serve more participants using the matrix-based scheme, its performance was highly satisfactory. Our experiments illustrated high imperceptibility levels for the matrix-based scheme, which in turn provides higher security and robustness compared to the original method, which provided very few shares serving a limited number of participants.