Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-020-04422-9 RESEARCH ARTICLE-COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Trustworthy Target Key Alteration Helping Counting-Based Secret Sharing Applicability Taghreed AlKhodaidi 1 · Adnan Gutub 2 Received: 30 May 2019 / Accepted: 19 February 2020 © King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals 2020 Abstract Sensitive information used online has resulted in the emergence of many security systems to be protected by secret keys. One of these security systems is the so-called secret sharing, in which certain key portions are distributed to allow sharing access by a specified number of participants. The sharing system requires that several users enter their shares, at the same time, to rebuild the main target key (TK) to access sensitive data within the system. Normally, the number of shares is limited by the number of zeros within TK as of our focus on the recent counting-based secret sharing strategy. If the number of participants is more than TK zeros, the complete system cannot work needing to reconsider regenerating TK again. In this work, we improved the original system of counting-based secret sharing to accommodate more participants via longer trustworthy TK selection. We proposed several possible models to enlarge the number of participants for applicable share’s keys generated from TK. The trustworthy security randomness of the new shares and adjusted target keys were all measured to select the best choice based on standard reliability randomness test. The study experimented the proposal on typical simulations applied on different target keys applicable sizes. The results presented that the final target key TK created as having the highest ratio of randomness to be preferred choice proven secure and reliable to protect information within the system. Keywords Counting-based secret sharing · Information security · Sensitive security systems · Secret keys · Shares generation · Share key 1 Introduction Information security is an area of concern and a critical topic, especially when Internet usage is widespread in the preservation and transmission of information. It is con- cerned with preventing unauthorized access to protect data against infringing uses such as disabling, stealing, modify- ing, destroying, or detecting data [1]. These data may be in different forms such as numbers, letters, pictures, and video. Information security attempts to protect data without affecting the work of the service negatively while ensur- ing confidentiality, integrity, and availability—known CIA of Cybersecurity. This field provides several techniques to achieve that, including what is concerned about hiding data B Adnan Gutub aagutub@uqu.edu.sa 1 Computer Science Department at Al-Qunfudhah, Umm Al-Qura University, Al-Qunfudhah, Saudi Arabia 2 Computer Engineering Department, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia such as steganography or encrypting data such as cryptog- raphy [2]. These common security techniques are based on one-sided protection of secret data, indicating that one user is responsible for protecting the secret data [3]. However, our research security techniques have been presented based on multiple sides, i.e., responsible for protecting secret data via several participants, as called secret sharing [4]. This scheme can be used in many sensitive protocols alone or as assistant to cryptography [5]. Its idea focused on the distribution of shadows of the main target key (TK), known as shares, among several users to gather for authentication. In other words, to access secret data, the users (all or part of them) must provide their shares combined at the same time to grant proper access [6]. This secret sharing principle was started by Shamir [1] and Blakley [3] depending on threshold case, where only a specific number of participants can reconstruct the target key TK to access the main secret data. Then, other struc- tures came into picture, called general access, such as what was introduced by Nishizeki [4] followed by more effective schemes, as given in [5]. The benefit of all these schemes is 123