Model calculations to estimate the probability of secret reconstruction in computer environments

Information technologies have ushered in a new era for computer‐related communications. Use of the Internet for commercial applications and resource sharing has accelerated in recent years as well. Owing to such developments, computer security has become a critical issue nowadays. In some applications, a critical message can be divided into pieces and allocated at several different sites over the Internet for security access concern. To access such an important message, one must access the divided pieces from different sites to reconstruct the message. In this paper, we propose model calculations to evaluate the probability of secret reconstruction and a weighted share assignment algorithm for assigning shares on hosts in such a way that the probability to be able to reconstruct the secret becomes the highest. Examples are presented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.