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

[Peter Trei]

On 7/31/2010 2:54 PM, Adam Shostack wrote:
> 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.
>    
At RSA Security back in the early 2000s, I devised protection schemes, 
and wrote product code using 5 of 7 Shamir secret sharing for certain 
products.

Peter Trei



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