Abstract
The secret sharing scheme is a data security tool that provides reliability and robustness for multi-user authentication systems. This work focus on improving the counting-based secret sharing technique for higher shares security as well as simple and fast computation. The research considers resolving some originally published defects in the shares reconstruction phase by proposing a new distribution model. This distribution model has been optimized practical and efficient. Also, the shares reconstruction model reflects increasing the security of the system by shares authenticity via steganography. We have employed multimedia image-based steganography methods to store the optimized shares that is presenting comparisons for proofed remarks. The paper experimentations tests the work of the enhancements by assuming different secret sharing key sizes of 64-bit, 128-bit, and 256-bit to make sure of practical variations within the security study. The shares usability has been further optimized by testing embedding each generated share using five different techniques of image-based steganography. The results showed a significant attractive impact making the optimized counting-based secret sharing scheme considered a promising solution for multi-user authentication security applications. This optimized system has been analyzed according to the distortion security and capacity parameters showing attractive contributions opening the research direction for further research to come.