DIVERSITY-DRIVEN XOR SECRET SHARING: RELIABLE AND SECURE MULTI-PATH TRANSMISSION

Author

Richard M. Olu Jordan, University of Texas at ArlingtonFollow

Graduation Semester and Year

Fall 2025

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Re´mi A. Chou

Second Advisor

Hui Lu

Third Advisor

Shirin Nilizadeh

Abstract

The growing reliance on distributed storage and multipath communication sys- tems has intensified the need for security mechanisms that remain robust even when individual nodes or channels are compromised. Secret sharing provides an information- theoretic approach to achieving both confidentiality and availability, and XOR-based constructions in particular offer lightweight and highly structured designs. This thesis develops a unified analytical framework for understanding and evalu- ating XOR-based secret sharing schemes across multiple operational settings, includ- ing plaintext storage, encrypted-data scenarios, and noisy binary symmetric chan- nels (BSCs). Building on a general (t, n) system model, we examine five threshold configurations—(2, 3), (2, 4), (2, 5), (3, 4), and (3, 5)—and show how each achieves perfect secrecy and recoverability through carefully arranged XOR relationships and independent randomness. For every scheme studied, we prove that the share size and randomness require- ments meet the known information-theoretic lower bounds for perfect secret sharing, establishing optimality in the α = 0 regime. In the noisy-channel setting, we analyze vi reconstruction reliability under bit-flip errors and characterize how XOR decoding propagates channel noise, providing insight into performance in practical multi-path systems. Together, these results present a cohesive, multi-setting perspective on XOR-based secret sharing, highlighting its simplicity, optimality, and applicability to secure distributed storage and communication environments

Keywords

Secret sharing, XOR-based constructions, Perfect secrecy, Threshold schemes, Encrypted data, Binary symmetric channels, Information-theoretic bounds, Randomness requirements, Distributed storage, Reconstruction

Disciplines

Computer and Systems Architecture | Data Storage Systems | Digital Communications and Networking

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Olu Jordan, Richard M., "DIVERSITY-DRIVEN XOR SECRET SHARING: RELIABLE AND SECURE MULTI-PATH TRANSMISSION" (2025). Computer Science and Engineering Theses. 538.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/cse_theses/538