Abstract
A new scheme of password/key distribution, or secret sharing, is presented. Its cryptographic strength is based on the integer factorization problem. It realizes the idea of a threshold scheme in which distributed trust or shared control is ensured by gating a critical action on cooperation by t of n users, with l<t<n. A secret passphrase or a private key is divided into pieces, called ‘shares’, which are distributed and stored between n users or n networked computers in such a way that pooling shares of at least t users enables reconstruction of the original password/key. We provide an elementary introduction illustrated with one of the simplest known protocols based on modular arithmetic, the Chinese Remainder Theorem and Euclid’s Algorithm computing the greatest common divisor.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Dobrzański, W., Soroczuk, A., Srebrny, M., Srebrny, M. (2002). Distributed Password. In: Sołdek, J., Pejaś, J. (eds) Advanced Computer Systems. The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 664. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8530-9_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8530-9_33
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-4635-7
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