Re: holographic remailing & the scientologists (fwd)
A number of secret-sharing/splitting programs for Unix are available at idea.sec.dsi.unimi.it/pub/crypt/code, ftp.dsi.unimi.it's new location For instance, check idea.sec.dsi.unimi.it/pub/crypt/code/secshar.tar.gz Ciao, David
Forwarded by Robert Hettinga
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 15:20:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> To: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com> cc: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Re: holographic remailing & the scientologists MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Precedence: bulk
On Sat, 25 May 1996, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
frankly, I think this was a great idea that we could explore some more. in a sense, it stores data "holographically" over all kinds of different people's messages. imagine a system in which the scientology documents are stored in people's signatures, and someone writes software to go and recombine the documents based on finding signatures "out there".
This software already exists. Take a look at Disperse/Collect at http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai. Disperse splits a file into n base64 encoded pieces where any k of them can be used to reconstruct the original. Collect will search through arbitrary collection of files (for example the entire news spool) for these pieces and automatically reconstruct everything that it finds.
Wei Dai
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On Tue, 28 May 1996, David Vincenzetti wrote:
A number of secret-sharing/splitting programs for Unix are available at idea.sec.dsi.unimi.it/pub/crypt/code, ftp.dsi.unimi.it's new location
For instance, check idea.sec.dsi.unimi.it/pub/crypt/code/secshar.tar.gz
Disperse/Collect is a information dispersal program rather than a secret sharing program. They are similiar have different purposes. Here we want to improve accessibility and reliability without regard to secrecy. That is, for information dispersal we don't care if information about the original file is leaked with with each share, whereas secret sharing has to guarantee that an attacker can find out nothing about the original secret unless he has at least k shares. That aside, Disperse/Collect might be better suited for what Vladimir had in mind because it was explicitly designed for broadcasting files through Usenet. The secret sharing programs you mention would not work well because each share would be as big as the original secret. (There are secret sharing schemes with short shares, but I don't think any of those programs implement the more efficient schemes.) Wei Dai
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Wei Dai