Novel and practical scheme based on secret sharing for laptop data protection

Abstract

With the benefits of portability and mobility, laptops have become more and more popular. People usually believe that their personal laptop is safe, and they store sensitive data in it. However, when a laptop is stolen, a malicious thief can obtain illegitimate benefits by extracting sensitive data from the laptop. For this reason, several security mechanisms for protecting sensitive data on laptops have been designed. Kao et al. (2012) designed a protocol (MELP) that allowed laptop users to use their mobile phones as the encryption key to protect their files. Although the mobile-based mechanism is secure, the authors still believe that it is limited by third-generation mobile devices and online data encryption/decryption. In this study, the authors present their design about a novel scheme based on secret-sharing technique. In the authors’ proposed scheme, users can easily encrypt/decrypt their laptop data offline, that is, without access to the Internet. Furthermore, the authors’ security analysis shows that their scheme satisfies all of the essential requirements for security and functionality. Also, the authors’ performance analysis indicates that their proposed scheme has better efficiency, which makes it suitable for use in protecting the data stored on laptops.