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How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

ente.com

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Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#63

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…

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Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#64
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my favorite one yet, very user friendly. I only wish it was a bit more configurable. Ideally I'd be able to set up something like: 3 of 4: A B C D - OR - 2 of 3: E F G - AND - 1 of 1: H Or any similar combination. Maybe also with a way to name the cards so it's clear exactly what's needed when restoring. Though there's something to be said for the simplicity of the current design.

that's just 3 shamir secret sharings. key is protected by a 3 of 3 keys. 1 protected by 3 of 4 (i.e. SSS the key into a 3 of 4) 1 protected by 2 of 3 (i.e. SSS the key into a 2 of 3) 1 that just is. so you take your original key and SSS into a 3 of 3. you take part 1 and SSS into a 3 of 4, and take part 2 and SSS into a 2 of 3.

Yes, but a 3 of 4 SSS is not possible with the linked web page. It's also not user-friendly to expect non-technical users to manually go through multiple rounds of SSS in order to restore the original secret. Ideally it'd just be one page that clearly explains exactly what they need to provide and then restores the secret for them.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#65
post #8

This is such a cool technique, and you could even teach it in secondary schools as a neat thing computer scientists can do with polynomials.

It's the same idea as how GPS works. Fun to see someone's eyes light up when they get why that third satellite is needed to fix a 2D position.

(Actual GPS is a little more complicated than that because the real system needs accurate time information.)

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#66

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

> it's said to be one of the toughest Indian language to learn.

By who? My SO is now passably conversant in Malayalam after watching their cinema during the covid lockdowns (~1y to 2y).

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#67

SSS is amazing, though managing shares over a long period (people come and go) and dealing with collusion risk can be rough.

You can never be sure that duplicated information is destroyed, but if you combine SSS with a dead-man's switch protecting an asymmetric private key, you can periodically invalidate a set of shares.

As a bonus, when you refresh the shares, you'll discover that at least a couple of your trusted parties have absolutely no memory of receiving that mysterious piece of paper from you back in 2022.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#68

It's an incredible technique, when I came across it, it just changed the way I thought of solving giving out keys without "truly" giving them out. This gave me confidence for eternalvault.app, a project of mine.

I’ve been noodling over this exact business idea for a couple years! Part of my value prop was to make ops scale down to as close to zero as possible by having the encrypted data and most of the front end for accessing it live in S3 objects (or some similar mega-cheap object store). Aside from that, all you need is the dead man’s switch mechanism. And the secret fragments would live on QR codes that bring you to the…

Indeed, that's precisely why I decided to ditch out of the subscription model and went into one time payment method, did the math and it made sense that I don't need a very heavy system apart from supporting the dead man switch trigger

Wrote my thoughts about that here: https://eternalvault.app/blog/why-we-are-adding-lifetime-pri...

And it feels good to know that there are people out thinking about this, makes me happy truly and if you want to try out the platform, welcome aboard, happy to walk through it if needed. :)

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