Score:1

The state of Shamir's Secret Sharing in 2023

cw flag

Shamir's Secret Sharing GPL implementation called ssss got removed from Tails OS years back.

  • Is Shamir's secret sharing still secure nowadays? Why was it removed from Tails OS?
  • Is it true that the technical limit is a maximum of 128 characters?
Ievgeni avatar
cn flag
What do you call "technical limit"?
poncho avatar
my flag
If, by technical limit, you mean something inherent within Shamir's Secret Sharing protocol, no, there isn't; it can share arbitrarily large secrets. If you mean something inherent within the `ssss` implementation, well, there might be...
Sir Muffington avatar
cw flag
@levgeni a hard limit programmed into `ssss`
Score:3
cn flag

The Tails 3.14 announcement list ssss as one of a dozen applications removed in that version, and then says

You can install these applications again using the Additional Software feature.

Thanks to the removal of these less popular applications in 3.14 and the removal of some language packs in 3.13.2, Tails 3.14 is 39 MB smaller than 3.13.

So it appears to me that ssss was removed only because it wasn't widely used, and it is still available, just not installed by default.

Shamir secret sharing is as secure as it ever was. See this answer by fgrieu for a summary. I can't vouch for ssss's implementation of it.

There is no limit on the length of the secret, but specific implementations like ssss may have limits.

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

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