Secret Sharing and Proactive Renewal of Shares in Hierarchical Groups

Secret sharing in user hierarchy represents a challenging area for research. Although a lot of work has already been done in this direc- tion, this paper presents a novel approach to share a secret among a hierarchy of users while overcoming the limitations of the already exist- ing mechanisms. Our work is based on traditional (k +1; n)-threshold secret sharing, which is secure as long as an adversary can compromise not more than k secret shares. But in real life it is often feasible for an adversary to obtain more than k shares over a long period of time. So, in our work we also present a way to overcome this vulnerability, while implementing our hierarchical secret sharing scheme. The use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography makes the computations easier and faster in our work.