Abstract
Sensitive information requires many security systems to be protected by secret keys. One of these practical security systems is the so-called counting-based secret sharing, in which certain key portions are distributed to allow sharing access by specified number of real participants. Secret shares are hidden adopting a humanized remembrance tool to serve uncontrolled assigned shares, which are generated from the security system via an automatic authentic target key generation process. While in their counting-based secret sharing process, the shares become challenging to be memorized unlike the normal password assignment that enjoys full personal selection. Therefore, our secret shares models are proposed to be hidden inside the personally chosen texts utilizing improved Arabic text steganography. The current steganography models' study is based on Kashida extension character that is redundant within Arabic writing text. We refined new models to hide data via Arabic text steganography used within counting-based secret sharing technique. The research tests our two proposed modifications to original Arabic text steganography and all are serving secret sharing on the same text database. The comparisons examined the different models on the same benchmark of 40 standard text statements (40 Prophet Hadiths). The results are significant and present promising research contributions. CO 2019 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).