11 Facts About Secret sharing

Whereas insecure secret sharing allows an attacker to gain more information with each share, secure secret sharing is 'all or nothing'.

Secret sharing was invented independently by Adi Shamir and George Blakley in 1979.

Secret sharing schemes are ideal for storing information that is highly sensitive and highly important.

Secret sharing allows the distributor of the secret to trust a group 'in aggregate'.

Secret sharing schemes allow the distributor to securely store the secret with the group even if not all members can be trusted all the time.

Secret sharing has been suggested for sensor networks where the links are liable to be tapped by sending the data in shares which makes the task of the eavesdropper harder.

Disadvantage of unconditionally secure secret sharing schemes is that the storage and transmission of the shares requires an amount of storage and bandwidth resources equivalent to the size of the secret times the number of shares.

One of these techniques, known as secret sharing made short, combines Rabin's information dispersal algorithm with Shamir's secret sharing.

The final step in secret sharing made short is to use Shamir secret sharing to produce shares of the randomly generated symmetric key and then give one share and one fragment to each shareholder.

In multi-secret sharing designed by Matthew K Franklin and Moti Yung, multiple points of the polynomial host secrets; the method was found useful in numerous applications from coding to multi-party computations.

Secret sharing is an important primitive in several protocols for secure multiparty computation.