George Robert Blakley Jr | |
---|---|
Born | May 6, 1932 |
Died | December 10, 2018 86) | (aged
Alma mater | Georgetown University (BSc) University of Maryland (PhD) |
Known for | Secret sharing |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Cryptography |
Institutions | Cornell University, Harvard University, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, State University of New York at Buffalo |
Thesis | (1960) |
George Robert (Bob) Blakley Jr. was an American cryptographer and a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University, best known for inventing a secret sharing scheme in 1979 (see [1] ).
Blakley did his undergraduate studies in physics at Georgetown University, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1960. After postdoctoral studies at Cornell University and Harvard University, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the State University of New York at Buffalo before joining Texas A&M in 1970. At Texas A&M, he was chairman of the mathematics department from 1970 to 1978. [2]
Blakley served on the board of directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research from 1993 to 1995. [2] He co-founded the International Journal of Information Security , published by Springer-Verlag, in 2000, [2] [3] and then served on its advisory board. [4]
His son, George Robert (Bob) Blakley III, is also a computer security researcher. [5]
In order to split a secret into several shares, Blakley's scheme specifies the secret as a point in n-dimensional space, and gives out shares that correspond to hyperplanes that intersect the secret point. Any n such hyperplanes will specify the point, while fewer than n hyperplanes will leave at least one degree of freedom, and thus leave the point unspecified. [6]
In contrast, Shamir's secret sharing scheme represents the secret as the y-intercept of an n-degree polynomial, and shares correspond to points on the polynomial. [7]
In 2001 Blakley received an honorary doctorate from Queensland University of Technology. [2] [8]
In 2009 he was named a fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. [2] [9] [10]
RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is a public-key cryptosystem, one of the oldest widely used for secure data transmission. The initialism "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977. An equivalent system was developed secretly in 1973 at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British signals intelligence agency, by the English mathematician Clifford Cocks. That system was declassified in 1997.
Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm, a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme, one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.
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Secret sharing refers to methods for distributing a secret among a group, in such a way that no individual holds any intelligible information about the secret, but when a sufficient number of individuals combine their 'shares', the secret may be reconstructed. Whereas insecure secret sharing allows an attacker to gain more information with each share, secure secret sharing is 'all or nothing'.
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In cryptography, a secret sharing scheme is verifiable if auxiliary information is included that allows players to verify their shares as consistent. More formally, verifiable secret sharing ensures that even if the dealer is malicious there is a well-defined secret that the players can later reconstruct. The concept of verifiable secret sharing (VSS) was first introduced in 1985 by Benny Chor, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Baruch Awerbuch.
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Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) is an efficient secret sharing algorithm for distributing private information among a group. The secret cannot be revealed unless a quorum of the group acts together to pool their knowledge. To achieve this, the secret is mathematically divided into parts from which the secret can be reassembled only when a sufficient number of shares are combined. SSS has the property of information-theoretic security, meaning that even if an attacker steals some shares, it is impossible for the attacker to reconstruct the secret unless they have stolen the quorum number of shares.
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Secret sharing consists of recovering a secret S from a set of shares, each containing partial information about the secret. The Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) states that for a given system of simultaneous congruence equations, the solution is unique in some Z/nZ, with n > 0 under some appropriate conditions on the congruences. Secret sharing can thus use the CRT to produce the shares presented in the congruence equations and the secret could be recovered by solving the system of congruences to get the unique solution, which will be the secret to recover.
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