Comment on Password managers...
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 6 days agoFor a single password, it is indeed illogical to distribute it to others, in order to prevent it from being stolen and misused.
That said, the concept of distributing authority amongst others is quite sound. Instead of each owner having the whole secret, they only have a portion of it, and a majority of owners need to agree in order to combine their parts and use the secret. Rather than passwords, it’s typically used for cryptographically signing off on someone’s authenticity, where it’s known as threshold signatures
Imagine for a moment, instead of having 1 secret key, you have 7 secret keys, of which 4 are required to cooperate in the FROST protocol to produce a signature for a given message. You can replace these numbers with some integer t (instead of 4) out of n (instead of 7).
This signature is valid for a single public key.
If fewer than t participants are dishonest, the entire protocol is secure.
blitzen@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
I remember learning about Shamir’s secret sharing, and indeed the concept is fascinating. I’m not sure passwords is the best use case of something like that, but I’m not against it in theory. On the other hand, I have thought about breaking my master passphrase into several parts (word 1 + word 2, word 2 + word 3, word 3 + word 4, etc.) and giving each two word segment to my siblings. If all my siblings minus one got together, say in the event of my death, they would have my full master passphrase to get into all the things I have protected behind it.