Secret sharing scheme using Gray code and XOR operation

Secret sharing refers to method for distributing a secret among a group of participants. It is also known as secret splitting. In this, each of the participants is allocated a share of the secret. The individual share doesn't carry any information. The secret can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number or all of shares are combined together. Secret-sharing schemes are important tools in cryptography and they are used as building blocks in many secure protocols, e.g., general protocol for multiparty computation, Byzantine agreement, threshold cryptography, access control, attribute-based encryption, and generalized oblivious transfer. Visual secret sharing, aka Visual Cryptography, provides a very powerful technique by which visual secret can be distributed into two or more shares. When the shares are combined together, the original visual secret can be discovered. In this paper, as first part, many types of secret sharing schemes are examined. Secondly we proposed two variant of a secret sharing scheme using Gray code and XOR operation. The Gray code is used to construct the shares and the XOR operation is used to reconstruct the secret. The proposed method can be used as a cryptographic algorithm and also for secret sharing as well as visual secret sharing.