A survey on counting-based secret sharing schemes for resource-constrained environments: techniques, security, challenges, and future directions

Secret sharing schemes play a vital role in securely distributing a secret among multiple participants, ensuring confidentiality and access control. However, traditional secret sharing schemes face limitations in resource-constrained environments, such as IoT devices, embedded systems, and low-power sensors, due to constraints in computational power, memory, energy, and communication capabilities. To address these challenges, lightweight secret sharing schemes have emerged as a promising solution, aiming to provide efficient techniques for secret sharing while maintaining an acceptable level of security. One such lightweight scheme is the counting-based secret sharing scheme, specifically designed to meet the needs of resource-constrained devices and environments. This scheme leverages parallel bits counting operations to reconstruct the secret and introduces innovative techniques for generating shares, optimizing the trade-off between security and computational efficiency. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of counting-based secret sharing schemes for resource-constrained environments. It highlights recent advancements in the field, identifies promising research directions, and discusses the open challenges that lie ahead in the development and utilization of counting-based secret sharing schemes. Additionally, potential applications of counting-based secret sharing schemes in various domains such as IoT, embedded systems, low-power sensors, secure multi-party computation, cloud computing, healthcare systems, financial services, supply chain management, military and defense, smart grids, and blockchain technology are discussed to emphasize the relevance and versatility of these schemes in real-world scenarios. Through this survey, researchers gain a comprehensive understanding of counting-based secret sharing schemes. This survey aims to inspire further innovation and advancements in the field of counting-based secret sharing schemes, ultimately contributing to the development and utilization of efficient and secure secret sharing techniques in resource-constrained environments.