Investigating the applicability of nested secret share for drone fleet photo storage

Military drones can be used for surveillance or spying on enemies. They, however, can be either destroyed or captured, therefore photos contained inside them can be lost or revealed to the attacker. A possible solution to solve such a problem is to adopt Secret Share (SS) techniques to split photos into several sections/chunks and distribute them among a fleet of drones. The advantages of using such a technique are two folds. Firstly, no single drone contains any photo in its entirety; thus even when a drone is captured, the attacker cannot discover any photos. Secondly, the storage requirements of drones can be simplified, and thus cheaper drones can be produced for such missions. In this scenario, a fleet of drones consists of t+r drones, where t (threshold) is the minimum number of drones required to reconstruct the photos, and r (redundancy) is the maximum number of lost drones the system can tolerate. The optimal configuration of t+r is a formidable task. This configuration is typically rigid and hard to modify in order to fit the requirements of specific missions. In this work, we addressed such an issue and proposed the adoption of a flexible Nested Secret Share (NSS) technique. In our experiments, we compared two of the major SS algorithms (Shamir's schema and the Redundant Residue Number System (RRNS)) with their Two-Level NSS (2NSS) variants to store/retrieve photos. Results showed that Redundant Residue Number System (RRNS) is more suitable for a drone fleet scenario.