At 10:55 PM 2/21/97 GMT, Adam Back wrote:
Here is a proposal for consideration for inclusion in the OpenPGP standard:
Great work, Adam! Pursuant to some of the recent rants on cypherpunks, I would like to see a proposal for a secret sharing mechanism that would allow the recovery of a storage-only key with m of n shares in the event that the passphrase to the storage key is unavailable, with the following attributes: 1. Secret-sharing should be strongly discouraged for signature and communication keys, for obvious anti-GAK/GACK reasons. 2. The values of m and n should be definable by the generator of (or anyone who knows the passphrase to) the storage key. 3. The sharing algorithm and format of the share packets should be standardised, so that any open-pgp compliant application can recover the storage key without a passphrase, given the key and a sufficient number of valid shares. Jonathan Wienke What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is too hard to understand? (From 2nd Amendment, U.S. Constitution) PGP 2.6.2 RSA Key Fingerprint: 7484 2FB7 7588 ACD1 3A8F 778A 7407 2928 DSS/D-H Key Fingerprint: 3312 6597 8258 9A9E D9FA 4878 C245 D245 EAA7 0DCC Public keys available at pgpkeys.mit.edu. PGP encrypted e-mail preferred. US/Canadian Windows 95/NT or Mac users: Get Eudora Light + PGP 5.0 for free at http://www.eudora.com/eudoralight/ Get PGP 5.0 for free at http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pgp-form.html Non-US PGP 5.0 sources: http://www.ifi.uio.no/pgp/ http://www.heise.de/ct/pgpCA/download.shtml ftp://ftp.pca.dfn.de/pub/pgp/V5.0/ ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/pc/win95/pgp ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/mac/pgp http://www.shopmiami.com/utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/replay/pub/pgp/pgp50/win/ RSA export-o-matic: print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc` Stupidity is the one arena of of human achievement where most people fulfill their potential.