Have any y'all used ssss?

I just came across ssss -- an implementation of Shamir's secret sharing scheme. It seems like a great way to save passwords. Have any y'all used it? Comments appreciated.

Edit: OK, I put this in the wrong place. Mea culpa.

 

Haven't used it, but read about it and related secret shares. Like it.

 

Trouble is, when you have a secret that is shared...is it really a secret?

 

Right

Anyway, two aspects interest me. One, it's possible to distribute pieces of a secret to many people such that some arbitrary percentage (100% even) must cooperate in order to discover the secret -- such as the revocation certificate for the Debian archive key, or the DNSSEC root key. If the number were large enough, perhaps this could be the basis of a trust model, or rather, a "threshold-distrust" model.

The other is storing strong passwords (or keys or certicicates) in pieces, in multiple locations, and/or transmitting them via multiple channels.

 

@hierophant

Despite all your efforts and anonymity programs, you've managed to give away your location using one word - "Y'all"

 

It's an affectation, BTW Can't deny that I've spent serious time with Southerners, though. Polite folk. Women carry cute little guns in their purses.

 

The secret continue to be a secret, because it is only shared, and not revealed. When you give a "shared secret" to 10 personns, the 10 ten collaborating are able to find the secret, but no other subset of 9 personns (or least) is able to guess it.

2 distincts notions:

Shared Secret: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_secret

Secret Sharing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing

Hierophant I think was speaking about Secret Sharing.

 

Yes, I was.