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How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

ente.com

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Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#31

Post by ahazred8ta »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #10

something tangentially i am interested in is computing following the 'two person rule' for things like sudo. Yes I am logged into server X at terinal Y, and so is my co-worker and we both sign off on running command X

There's a related 2-man sudo login system here, not sure how finegrained it is.

https://github.com/Argonne-National-Laboratory/Pam-2man-Auth

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#33

Post by c0l0 »

We use this technique in our team to distribute passphrases for our secondary secret stores (that contain instructions on how to access our primary secret stores) in a "democratically secure and safe" manner.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ssss is a nice and rather straightforward implementation.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#34

Post by 946789987649 »

My masters thesis was on this! I created an app where you can store your data across all the common data storage providers (dropbox, google drive, onedrive, etc.) and used the secret sharing to aid with the encryption. The benefit was that:

- They could no longer read your data

- Additional redundancy (as you only need 2 to be available)

- Compared to other secure storage apps which rely on a master password, which if you forget, you are screwed, you could still use all the usual account recovery methods.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#35

Post by dfox »

ndr_ wrote: post #19

Bruce Schneier described this in his seminal book Applied Cryptography, and HashiCorp Vault used to have an implementation in Go. On the practical side, I always wondered how large - in bits - the shares should be. One answer I got on a news group was "1 bit more than the actual key length". Nowadays, I wonder how the quantum computing threat would inform 1) share size choice and 2) pro/con Secret Sharing in general.…

One point is that there is no reason for the entire secret to be one element of the underlying field, it can very well be a n-tuple of elements of a smaller field, with GF(2^8) being the somewhat obvious choice if you do not expect ridiculous numbers of shares, no need to deal with bignum math.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#36

Post by DesiLurker »

SSS works pretty well. IIRC somebody in bitcoin community started using this for storing private keys using 3/5 schema. they basically divide the secret keys into 5 parts out of which you only need 3 to recover original private key. IDK if there are any hardware wallets that actually support it yet though.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#37

Post by luxcem »

946789987649 wrote: post #34

My masters thesis was on this! I created an app where you can store your data across all the common data storage providers (dropbox, google drive, onedrive, etc.) and used the secret sharing to aid with the encryption. The benefit was that: - They could no longer read your data - Additional redundancy (as you only need 2 to be available) - Compared to other secure storage apps which rely on a master password, which i…

It seems like a cool idea, did you follow up with a product or an open source app?

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#38

Post by 946789987649 »

luxcem wrote: post #37
946789987649 wrote: post #34

My masters thesis was on this! I created an app where you can store your data across all the common data storage providers (dropbox, google drive, onedrive, etc.) and used the secret sharing to aid with the encryption. The benefit was that: - They could no longer read your data - Additional redundancy (as you only need 2 to be available) - Compared to other secure storage apps which rely on a master password, which i…

It seems like a cool idea, did you follow up with a product or an open source app?

Unfortunately no, as most uni students my code was utterly terrible and the app itself was more of a PoC. This was 10 years ago though and it's been on my mind since then, so i'll surely pick it up some point, perhaps after my current start up.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#39

Post by aabdelhafez »

alfirous wrote: post #23
sreekanth850 wrote: post #16

ente means mine in Malayalam language. it's said to be one of the toughest Indian language to learn. FYI.

Interesting, in Indonesia Ente means you. Derived from Arabic word Anta. Fascinating how sometimes in different languages one word can have opposite meaning and the other times one word can have similar meaning.

Ente also means "duck" in German.
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