Deceptive Secret Sharing

We propose deceptive secret sharing, which is a novel approach to provide both confidentiality and deception in distributed storage systems. The motivation for this is to protect confidentiality as far as possible while acknowledging that no confidentiality scheme provides perfect protection. If confidentiality is breached and information is accessed by unauthorized individuals, our deceptive secret sharing techniques will reveal, with high probability, only false information. This provides an added deception layer on top of the confidentiality provided by basic secret sharing. We present deceptive techniques that work with both XOR secret sharing and Shamir’s polynomialbased threshold secret sharing. We provide extensive analyses of both overhead and security of our techniques and we show how they provide tunable security that can trade off security and overhead by varying a single parameter of the schemes. The proposed techniques were also implemented in CloudLab, where experimental evaluations showed that, with appropriate parameter choices, they can provide both reasonable performance and high availability.