Analysis and comparison the security and performance of secret sharing schemes

Abstract

Distributed storage systems merge a number of storage sites into a collective whole. Files are split into smaller pieces which are computationally manipulated and then distributed to the storage sites. It recovers some subset of pieces when a client wants to read a file whereas those pieces are combined to reconstruct the original file. Distributed storage systems are better than traditional single-site storage systems because they offer a variety of benefits such as availability, proximity and reliability. One of the basic methods used to disperse the data in storage systems are secret sharing schemes. In cryptography, secret sharing is a technique to share a secret among a group of members, each of which holds a portion of the secret. The secret can only be retrieved when a certain number of members combine their shares together while any combination with fewer shares has no extra information about the secret. There are many secret sharing schemes and each one achieves a different level of security with different performance and storage requirements. In this study, we analyze the security and performance of three secret schemes which are the most common schemes for information dispersal used within distributed storage systems, namely Shamir's scheme, Rabin's IDA and hybrid scheme. Several tests were conducted to understand the fundamental concept of the schemes as well as to explore the security, performance and the capability of the schemes.