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Novel key-integration to safeguard counting-based secret-sharing from possibilities of cyberattack breaches

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Abstract

In the face of malicious cyberattacks, classic security approaches like cryptography and steganography are becoming not sufficient. Secrecy are normally maintained by single party holding control over data causing it possibly being lost or revealed, with or without consciousness. Secret sharing can provide assistance unifying decisions by multi-authorized individuals distributing the target-key over several authorized participants, requested to interact for reconstructing the keys to reveal the privacy. Lately, counting-based secret sharing (CBSS) has been under focus being optimistic, as potential secret sharing scheme that is fast, intuitive, and practical. A primary limitation with this scheme is its restricted number of generated key-shares, which was deployed in the matrix-based secret sharing scheme. Unfortunately, the simple intuition behind these schemes made them prone to smart cyberattacks that can make uncovering the target-key dishonestly possible. In this paper, we demonstrate significant cyberattack weakness in the CBSS scheme, that also applies to the matrix-based scheme making them both unsafely vulnerable to selected key-shares integration. We introduce a novel algorithm that can defend this speculating existence of target-key suffering via exploring the problem deeply and advising appropriate protection procedure. The study enhances the structure secrecy to ensure that the key-shares are fully safeguarded. Our work further tests the security of the CBSS scheme protection strategy experimentations demonstrating remarked organisation robustness as well as possibility of producing sophisticated, versatile security system, to overcome breaching weaknesses of key-shares components for current ongoing developing IT utilizations.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Umm Al-Qura University (UQU) for motivating this research. All appreciation to my genius graduate students of Computer Engineering course: Advanced Topics in Information Security (1400519) as well as students of Computer & Information Security course (14034107-3) and Cryptography & Network Security course (14034108-3) offered both by Computer Engineering Department during 2023 and 2024, as all their collaborative work remarked attractive contribution and completion used within this paper. Thanks to our great school, Umm Al-Qura University – Makkah, for supporting research international visits to focus working out the Cybersecurity research hoping to continue offering the MS graduate program as well as allowing for PhD, approved by Ministry of Education within Saudi Arabia, opening doors for progressive scientific activities.

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  1. CyberSecurity Department, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

    Adnan Gutub & Faiza Al-Shaarani

  2. Computers Department at Al-Lith, Umm Al-Qura University, Al-Lith, Saudi Arabia

    Khoulood Alharthi

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  1. Adnan Gutub
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Correspondence to Adnan Gutub.

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Gutub, A., Al-Shaarani, F. & Alharthi, K. Novel key-integration to safeguard counting-based secret-sharing from possibilities of cyberattack breaches. Multimed Tools Appl (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-024-19027-9

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