Towards Secure and Reliable Data Storage with Multi-coefficient Secret Sharing

As computers become pervasive, data storage systems´ security, flexibility and reliability features turn into major design issues, especially in distributed and network-centric computing environments. Secret sharing is a well-known method to distribute a secret amongst a group of participants whereas each of them holds one share of the secret. When a enough number of such shares are collected, the original secret will be retrieved. Since these shares look different from the secret itself, data security is accomplished. However, Shamir´s secret sharing scheme imposes one potential restriction: the secret size should not be too big. To eliminate such a scalability obstacle, this paper intends to modify the Shamir´s scheme and utilize multiple coefficients in polynomials so that secret sharing can become useful for data management in distributed environments. Both security and reliability are achieved. Performance analysis and experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of such a multi-coefficient secret sharing scheme.