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ssss project is an implementation of Shamir's secret sharing scheme for UNIX systems. In cryptography, a secret sharing scheme is

License: GPL (GNU General Public License)
File size: 17K
Developer: B. Poettering
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ssss project is an implementation of Shamir's secret sharing scheme for UNIX systems.

In cryptography, a secret sharing scheme is a method for distributing a secret amongst a group of participants, each of which is allocated a share of the secret. The secret can only be reconstructed when the shares are combined together; individual shares are of no use on their own.

More formally, in a secret sharing scheme there is one dealer and n players. The dealer gives a secret to the players, but only when specific conditions are fulfilled.

The dealer accomplishes this by giving each player a share in such a way that any group of t (for threshold) or more players can together reconstruct the secret but no group of less than t players can. Such a system is called a (t,n)-threshold scheme.

A popular technique to implement threshold schemes uses polynomial interpolation ("Lagrange interpolation"). This method was invented by Adi Shamir in 1979. You can play around with a threshold scheme on the demo page.

Note that Shamir's scheme is provable secure, that means: in a (t,n) scheme one can prove that it makes no difference whether an attacker has t-1 valid shares at his disposal or none at all; as long as he has less than t shares, there is no better option than guessing to find out the secret.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds memory locking and TTY echo suppression.
A buffer overflow condition has been fixed.

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