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How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

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Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#3
before I learned of shamir secret sharing, I wondered why one couldn't do the same exact thing with a par2 like system (albiet with smaller pieces than a par2 system would traditionally have). i.e. you have X bits of data, you create Y*X/N sized recovery blocks (where Y > N). You hand each recovery block to individual users. and any N users can get together to recover the key and decrypt the contents.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#4
if the secret is large usually it's encrypted and the payload is distributed along with the shares of the key.

but you can also just use Reed-Solomon and split the payload, the difference with Shamir is that you lose information-theoretic security (you lose it the moment you use encryption anyway) and the payload also needs to undergo an all-or-nothing-transform (AONT).

AONT transforms the entire payload into an encrypted blob which also serves as its own key, a withheld piece is a de facto encryption key. this is required because Reed-Solomon can have pathological cases where pieces leak information.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#5

before I learned of shamir secret sharing, I wondered why one couldn't do the same exact thing with a par2 like system (albiet with smaller pieces than a par2 system would traditionally have). i.e. you have X bits of data, you create Y*X/N sized recovery blocks (where Y > N). You hand each recovery block to individual users. and any N users can get together to recover the key and decrypt the contents.

[deleted]

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#7
post #4

if the secret is large usually it's encrypted and the payload is distributed along with the shares of the key. but you can also just use Reed-Solomon and split the payload, the difference with Shamir is that you lose information-theoretic security (you lose it the moment you use encryption anyway) and the payload also needs to undergo an all-or-nothing-transform (AONT). AONT transforms the entire payload into an encr…

Reed-Solomon is an Erasure code, and I definitely wouldn't look to that for Secret Splitting. Those leakage models are gnarly. But if you want something else that is more general - there are Monotone Span Programs. Seriously underused.

Re: How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works

#9
post #7
post #4

if the secret is large usually it's encrypted and the payload is distributed along with the shares of the key. but you can also just use Reed-Solomon and split the payload, the difference with Shamir is that you lose information-theoretic security (you lose it the moment you use encryption anyway) and the payload also needs to undergo an all-or-nothing-transform (AONT). AONT transforms the entire payload into an encr…

Reed-Solomon is an Erasure code, and I definitely wouldn't look to that for Secret Splitting. Those leakage models are gnarly. But if you want something else that is more general - there are Monotone Span Programs. Seriously underused.

    > Reed-Solomon is an Erasure code
which shares the same math as Shamir

    > Those leakage models are gnarly.
AONT solves that by making any leak other than the totality meaningless
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