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I would expect this relates to Hashicorp's Vault product. It's gaining some notoriety and employs Shamir's secrets to seal/unseal the main vault.
Which sucks when it's 2am and you start blowing up a majority of shard holders phones to unseal it because it sealed itself causing a critical outage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's old, but it's surprisingly not that old. From a cursory glance at Wikipedia, it looks like Shamir's paper was published in 1979, which is stunningly late for a technique that, in principle, could be done with pencil and paper. When I first learned about SSSS, I asked my professor after class why it wasn't invented earlier. He replied that even thinking of trying something like SSSS first requires the insight tha…
"You can encode arbitrary data in numeric form" is Kurt Gödel in the first half of the 20th century. His Incompleteness results show that you can essentially write "This statement is false" as a number and blow up the grand project of formalising all of mathematics as a single (edit: typos) infallible, provable monolith. If that's the key insight you could do SSSS before any actual digital computers were built (those…
Specifically, that's something like the first two thirds of his incompleteness proof spent establishing that as a fairly novel result, followed by rigorous mathematics to the effect of "Given a formula P(x,y) that asserts "We can't prove x(y,y).", can we prove P(P,P)?".
This is fascinating but being neither a CS nor Maths graduate I'm having trouble following the maths from the moment modulo operations are introduced. Would someone be able to suggest a self-learning resource (book, app, ...) that goes into cryptography and the required maths but doesn't demand too much pre-knowledge? Thanks in advance!
vault ( https://vaultproject.io ) uses Shamir to generate shares for operators to unseal the vault. In the latest release (1.0beta), vault seal keys can be wrapped with something like AWS KMS which allow for operator-less unsealing of the seal keys, but trade that off with potential operator access to the seal key itself. Collusion between operators is a real problem of Shamir-based key systems. If you have a crypto…
This is fascinating but being neither a CS nor Maths graduate I'm having trouble following the maths from the moment modulo operations are introduced. Would someone be able to suggest a self-learning resource (book, app, ...) that goes into cryptography and the required maths but doesn't demand too much pre-knowledge? Thanks in advance!
https://www.crypto101.io/