A probability model for reconstructing secret sharing under the internet environment

Abstract

Internet technologies have ushered in a new era for computer-related communications. Use of the Internet for commercial applications and resource sharing has accelerated in recent years as well. Owing to such developments, Internet security has become a critical issue for both academic and commercial sectors. Several studies have focused on areas involving network security such as authentication, privacy, and integrity. In some applications, an important message can be divided into pieces and allocated at several different sites over the Internet for security access concern. For example, an important map that can be used to access a military base, a vital key that can be used to give a military order or command. To access such an important message, one must reconstruct the divided pieces from different sites under the given Internet environment. In this paper, we present a novel probability model for reconstructing secret sharing under the Internet. Also, how to assign the divided shares into different sites over the Internet is studied. Also proposed herein are algorithms to perform shares assignment and to evaluate the probability of reconstructing the divided pieces into the original secret. Illustrative examples and simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.