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

[Steven Bellovin]

On Jul 31, 2010, at 8:44 12AM, 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).

There is circumstantial evidence that such schemes were deployed for U.S. nuclear weapons command and control.  I also wonder if it's used for some of the NSA's root keys -- they run very large PKIs.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb





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