Trivial Secret Sharing
There are several (t, n) secret sharing schemes for t = n, when all shares are necessary to recover the secret:
- Encode the secret as an integer s. Give to each player i (except one) a random integer ri. Give to the last player the number . The secret is the sum of the players' shares.
- Encode the secret as an arbitrary length binary number s. Give to each player i (except one) a random number pi with the same length as s. Give to the last player the result of (s XOR p1 XOR p2 XOR ... XOR pi) where XOR is bitwise exclusive or. The secret is the bitwise XOR of all the players' numbers (p).
When space efficiency is not a concern, these schemes can be used to reveal a secret to any desired subsets of the players simply by applying the scheme for each subset. For example, to reveal a secret s to any two of the three players Alice, Bob and Carol, create three different (2,2) secret shares for s, giving the three sets of two shares to Alice and Bob, Alice and Carol, and Bob and Carol. This approach quickly becomes impractical as the number of subsets increases, for example when revealing a secret to any 50 of 100 players, whereas the schemes described below allow secrets to efficiently be shared with a threshold of players.
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