Utilization of secret sharing technology for secure communication: a state-of-the-art review

Cryptography is the process by which a readable message is converted into cipher-text unintelligible to an eavesdropper. With the advent of the internet, improved network infrastructures, and modern applications, electronic-based systems came into existence. Subsequently, the need for security of the personalized information was discerned. The purpose of the use of cryptography is to provide security, confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of the data exchanged. Many cryptographic techniques which include the symmetric key and asymmetric key-based encryption techniques are generally employed for the above-mentioned purposes. However, it is seen that in cryptographic solutions key management is an important issue. In this review, we discuss the secret-sharing based cryptographic techniques that are inherently different from the conventional cryptographic systems. Since images constitute a large proportion of the multimedia transmitted, the concept of secret sharing is being applied to images as well. In this review, Image Secret Sharing techniques have been discussed in detail. Secret sharing or secret splitting is a method by which a secret is divided among a set of participants. Each participant receives a part or share of the secret. During the secret recovery phase, a subset of a predefined number of participants can collaborate and reveal the secret information. This work attempts to categorize and classify various available secret sharing schemes, to gather all the state-of-the-art knowledge on a single platform for research.