SCAR

Scatter Conceal and Recover, or SCAR for short, was the research project that two other students and I worked on during the 2015 summer semester.  We also built an Android application to use the algorithm, on GitHub.  This project uses the Reed-Solomon algorithm of bit redundancy, databases, and a splish-splash of cryptography to securely break files into N parts but only need k parts to recreate the file.  In other words: magic.  A high level overview of the project is that the algorithm will encrypt a file using and AES key that we get from SHA-256 hashing some unique information together.  Then, the newly encrypted file will have redundancy added to it using the Reed-Solomon algorithm.  This encrypted file is then broken up into N parts, which is also done by Reed-Solomon, and each of these N parts are stored randomly on the known databases(MySQL, Dropbox etc).  A hash-chain is used to figure out what server each chunk gets stored on.  The reverse is done to retrieve the file, but the interesting part is that we only need k out of N total file chunks to run the algorithm in reverse and get the original file back.  To compile and run you will need an Android IDE with an emulator.  The basic one that I used was Android Studio and Genymotion, respectively, and you would click the green play button to compile and run the program.