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zeroonetwothreetoday at 4:30 PM2 repliesview on HN

Isn’t one time pad just a simple version of secret sharing?


Replies

mswphdtoday at 5:59 PM

you can sort-of view it that way, but it's not particularly useful. There are settings where you can view (steps of) a cryptographic algorithm as applying a one-time pad with a pseudorandom pad (say counter-mode encryption for the most obvious example, though it appears elsewhere as well).

Alternatively, shamir's secret sharing can be extended to threshold settings pretty easily. So you can write a generalized scheme where you only recover things when "enough people" (but perhaps not everyone) tries to reconstruct. This generalized scheme doesn't look particularly like the one-time pad.

So they end up coinciding in the 2-party case over F2 but it seems to be mostly a coincidence.

kibwentoday at 5:56 PM

I would say that SSS is a generalization of OTP, but OTP in practice is so dramatically and unbelievably simpler than SSS that it's not practically useful to consider it as "just" a special-case of SSS. Which is to say, if you were implementing OTP, you would not just implement SSS and then set the right parameters; you would use an entirely distinct implementation.