A comparative analysis of Secret Sharing Schemes with special reference to e-commerce applications

The term cryptography which means “secret writing” has become the foundation primitive in providing security for many communication applications. In many applications, particularly in Group Communication, there is a need to hide secret data like passwords, encryption key, recipes etc. Here, efficient key management protocols are required to provide security for group's secret data, because it is very challenging to provide security especially when group of more members and those members are present in different locations with diverse mechanisms of protection. One among them is Secret Sharing Schemes (SSS) which allow to split and share the group's secret among group members. The secret can be retrived once, when some threshold member combines their share value in a defined way. Across the years, several schemes on Secret Sharing have been presented. In this view, this paper mainly focuses on three different Secret Sharing schemes, such as Shamir's Secret Sharing based on Polynomial Interpolation, Asmuth-Bloom Secret Sharing Scheme based on Chinese Remainder Theorem and Verifiable Secret Sharing Scheme based on Elliptic Curves. All these three schemes have been studied, algorithms are programmed using MATLAB 7.0 tool and executed. It has been observed that all the three schemes works satisfactorily according to the properties defined by the inventors of the schemes.