Study on Secret Sharing Schemes (SSS) and their applications

Hiding a secret is needed in many situations. One might need to hide a password, an encryption key, a secret recipe, and etc. Information can be secured with encryption, but the need to secure the secret key used for such encryption is important too. Imagine you encrypt your important files with one secret key and if such a key is lost then all the important files will be inaccessible. Thus, secure and efficient key management mechanisms are required. One of them is secret sharing scheme (SSS) that lets you split your secret into several parts and distribute them among selected parties. The secret can be recovered once these parties collaborate in some way. This paper will study these schemes and explain the need for them and their security. Across the years, various schemes have been presented. This paper will survey some of them varying from trivial schemes to threshold based ones. Explanations on these schemes constructions are presented. The paper will also look at some applications of SSS.