Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory, 3rd Edition
by Wade Trappe, Lawrence C. Washington
17.2 Threshold Schemes
In the previous section, we showed how to split a secret among people so that all were needed in order to reconstruct the secret. In this section we present methods that allow a subset of the people to reconstruct the secret.
It has been reported that the control of nuclear weapons in Russia employed a safety mechanism where two out of three important people were needed in order to launch missiles. This idea is not uncommon. It’s in fact a plot device that is often employed in spy movies. One can imagine a control panel with three slots for keys and the missile launch protocol requiring that two of the three keys be inserted and turned at the same time in order to launch missiles to eradicate the earth.
Why not just ...
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