A Hybrid-Based Verifiable Secret Sharing Scheme Using Chinese Remainder Theorem

It is not always in the best interests to rely on an individual to have control of entire sensitive information. This has led to the need for secret sharing schemes, which divide secret (key) among many participants or shareholders. To avoid any cheating by any of the shareholders, the need for verifiable secret sharing (VSS) has emerged. In this context, a hybrid approach for VSS scheme is suggested in this paper. The proposed algorithm shares multiple secrets among shareholders, where shareholders are also divided/classified into different levels. Hence, it includes multiple as well as multilevel secret sharing. Secrets can be recovered at intra- or inter-level, where shareholders of higher level can contribute their shares to lower levels. To reduce the complexity, the one-way hash function is used instead of the hard number-theoretic problems. The proposed scheme stands against the dishonest dealer and shareholders. To rule out a typical dishonest strategy of leaking secret information in the valid shares, the concept of dealer leakage resilience is used by reducing the dealer’s powers of selecting random values on his own. The execution is also done using cryptographic libraries. Finally, it is demonstrated that the scheme satisfies the security requirements of VSS.