Paper 2017/642

Reducing Multi-Secret Sharing Problem to Sharing a Single Secret Based on Cellular Automata

Nasrollah Pakniat, Mahnaz Noroozi, and Ziba Eslami

Abstract

The aim of a secret sharing scheme is to share a secret among a group of participants in such a way that while authorized subsets of participants are able to recover the secret, non-authorized subsets of them obtain no information about it. Multi-secret sharing is the natural generalization of secret sharing for situations in which the simultaneous protection of more than one secret is required. However, there exist some secret sharing schemes for which there are no secure or efficient multi-secret sharing counterparts. In this paper, using cellular automata, an efficient general method is proposed to reduce the problem of sharing k secrets (all assigned with the same access structure and needed to be reconstructed at once) under a certain secret sharing scheme (S), to the problem of sharing one secret under S such that none of the properties of S are violated. Using the proposed approach, any secret sharing scheme can be converted to a multi-secret sharing scheme. We provide examples to show the applicability of the proposed approach.