Does this count as an instance of 'don't roll your own crypto'?
Shamir Secret Sharing
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#12Adding on to the pile of "Show HN your SSS playground", here's mine:
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#13OK, since we're pitching our SSS implementations here in comments, I welcome everyone to check out BananaSplit, https://bs.parity.io Not sure about year 2023, but at the time I wrote it for my previous employer there was nothing remotely usable for regular user. Thus, BananaSplit. It doesn't allow you to specify many parameters (just the number of shards, and then requires 50%+1 to recover); aimed at printed backups…
I like how it pushes you towards safety by requiring the code to run offline and off the disk. The resulting UX is not that great (though the explanation of what to do is clear), but it's a good step towards a little bit more security.
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#14Is there an alternative scheme that allows the different parties to enter their own password?
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#15Is there an alternative scheme that allows the different parties to enter their own password?
Symmetrically encrypt their share with the chosen password.
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#16Is there an alternative scheme that allows the different parties to enter their own password?
Not with passwords of their choice.
You could use SSS in combination with BIP to derive a set of 12 or 24-word passphrases, this might be a bit more user friendly.
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#17`killall` was different on Solaris than Linux; too.
Learning those differences by coming to Linux from Solaris was liberating; there were less limits generally. The other way around was less fun: as in this example, code that had run fine before was now subject to weird behaviors that were caused by underlying system assumptions being different. At least Solaris usually had decent documentation.
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#18>The idea (proposed by Adi Shamir – the A of RSA! – in 1979) is as simple as it is beautiful. Leonard Adleman might have something to say about that sentence.
If Adleman just had a first name starting with S, it would still work!
leona*R*d adleman, ron rive*S*t, and *A*di shamir, clearly.
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#19Does this count as an instance of 'don't roll your own crypto'?
Not at all. The problem was that the crypto for the same library on two different OSes was implemented differently, which lead to an error encrypting on Linux and decrypting on Solaris. Ironically, this would have been avoided if they had rolled their own.
It is an instance of "make sure you have backups when deploying to production"
Re: Shamir Secret Sharing
#20Wow, he shredded the only copy of the key his database backups were encrypted with.