question re practical use of secret sharing

[Peter Gutmann]

"Charles Jackson" <cljt1 at jacksons.net> writes:

>Is anyone aware of a commercial product that implements secret sharing? If
>so, can I get a pointer to some product literature?

It's available as part of other products (e.g. nCipher do it for keying their
HSMs), but I don't know of any product that just does... secret sharing.  What
would be the user interface for such an application?  What would be the target
audience?  (I mean a real target audience, not some hypothesised scenario).

(This is actually a serious question.  I talked with some crypto guys a few
years ago about doing a standard for secret sharing, but to do that we had to
come up with some general usage model for it rather than just one particular
application-specific solution, and couldn't).

Besides that, user demand for it was practically nonexistent... no, it was
completely nonexistent, apart from a few highly specialised custom uses we
couldn't even find someone to use as a guinea pig for testing, and the
existing specialised users already had specialised solutions of their own
for handling it.

Peter.

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