软件包: ssss (0.5-5)

Shamir's secret sharing scheme implementation

Implementation of Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. The program suite does both: the generation of shares for a known secret, and the reconstruction of a secret using user-provided shares.

Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme allows a secret to be split in to shares. These shares can then be distributed to different people. When the time comes to retrieve the secret then a preset number of the shares need to be combined. The number of shares created, and the number needed to retrieve the secret are set at splitting time. The number of shares required to re-create the secret can be chosen to be less that the number of shares created, so any large enough subset of the shares can retrieve the secret.

This scheme allows a secret to be shared, either to reduce the chances that the secret is lost, or to increase the number of parties that must cooperate to reveal the secret.