Is this the first ever practically-deployed use of a threshold scheme?

[Adam Shostack]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 06:44:12PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
| Apparently the DNS root key is protected by what sounds like a five-of-seven
| threshold scheme, but the description is a bit unclear.  Does anyone know
| more?
| 
| (Oh, and for people who want to quibble over "practically-deployed", I'm not
|  aware of any real usage of threshold schemes for anything, at best you have
|  combine-two-key-components (usually via XOR), but no serious use of real n-
|  of-m that I've heard of.  Mind you, one single use doesn't necessarily count
|  as "practically deployed" either).

We had a 3 of 7 for the ZKS master keys back in the day. When we
tested, we discovered that no one had written the secret-combining
code, and so Ian Goldberg wrote some and posted it to usenix for
backup.

Adam

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