ssss(1) General Commands Manual ssss(1) NAME ssss - Split and Combine Secrets using Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. SYNOPSIS ssss-split -t threshold -n shares [-w token] [-s level] [-x] [-q] [-Q] [-D] [-v] ssss-combine -t threshold [-r -n shares] [-x] [-q] [-Q] [-D] [-v] DESCRIPTION ssss is an implementation of Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. The program suite does both: the generation of shares for a known secret, and the re- construction of a secret using user-provided shares. COMMANDS ssss-split: prompt the user for a secret and generate a set of correspond- ing shares. ssss-combine: read in a set of shares and reconstruct the secret. OPTIONS -t threshold Specify the number of shares necessary to reconstruct the secret. -n shares Specify the number of shares to be generated. -w token Text token to name shares in order to avoid confusion in case one utilizes secret sharing to protect several independent secrets. The generated shares are prefixed by these tokens. -s level Enforce the scheme's security level (in bits). This option implies an upper bound for the length of the shared secret (shorter secrets are padded). Only multiples of 8 in the range from 8 to 1024 are al- lowed. If this option is ommitted (or the value given is 0) the se- curity level is chosen automatically depending on the secret's length. The security level directly determines the length of the shares. -r Recovery mode: ssss-combine reads in a set of -t shares and recon- struct n shares again. ssss-split doesn't generate shares randomly, but asks the secret and -t - 1 shares (secret is treated here as a share). Usable to recover forgotten shares. -x Hex mode: use hexadecimal digits in place of ASCII characters for I/O. This is useful if one wants to protect binary data, like block cipher keys. -q Quiet mode: disable all unnecessary output. Useful in scripts. -Q Extra quiet mode: like -q, but also suppress warnings. -D Disable the diffusion layer added in version 0.2. This option is needed when shares are combined that where generated with ssss ver- sion 0.1. -v Print version information. EXAMPLE In case you want to protect your login password with a set of ten shares in such a way that any three of them can reconstruct the password, you simply run the command ssss-split -t 3 -n 10 -w passwd To reconstruct the password pass three of the generated shares (in any or- der) to ssss-combine -t 3 NOTES To protect a secret larger than 1024 bits a hybrid technique has to be ap- plied: encrypt the secret with a block cipher and apply secret sharing to just the key. Among others openssl and gpg can do the encryption part: openssl bf -e < file.plain > file.encrypted gpg -c < file.plain > file.encrypted SECURITY ssss tries to lock its virtual address space into RAM for privacy reasons. But this may fail for two reasons: either the current uid doesn't permit page locking, or the RLIMIT_MEMLOCK is set too low. After printing a warn- ing message ssss will run even without obtaining the desired mlock. AUTHOR The original software (v0.5) was written in 2006 by B. Poettering (ssss AT point-at-infinity.org). The amended versions (v0.5.1+) were written between 2011..2020 by Jon D Frisby (jfrisby AT mrjoy.com). Find the newest version of ssss on the project's homepage: https://github.com/MrJoy/ssss/. FURTHER READING http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing Manuals User ssss(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | COMMANDS | OPTIONS | EXAMPLE | NOTES | SECURITY | AUTHOR | FURTHER READING
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