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TSS - Threshold Secret Sharing

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Ruby Docs : http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/tss

WARNING : BETA CODE

This code is new and has not yet been tested in production. Use at your own risk. The share format and interface should be fairly stable now but should not be considered fully stable until v1.0.0 is released.

About TSS

This Ruby gem implements Threshold Secret Sharing, as specified in the Network Working Group Internet-Draft submitted by D. McGrew (draft-mcgrew-tss-03.txt).

Threshold Secret Sharing (TSS) provides a way to generate N shares from a value, so that any M of those shares can be used to reconstruct the original value, but any M-1 shares provide no information about that value. This method can provide shared access control on key material and other secrets that must be strongly protected.

This threshold secret sharing method is based on polynomial interpolation in GF(256) and also provides a robust format for the storage and transmission of shares.

The sharing format is Robust Threshold Secret Sharing (RTSS) as described in the Internet-Draft. RTSS is a binary data format and a method for ensuring that any secrets recovered are identical to the secret that was originally shared.

This implementation supports RTSS digest types for NONE, SHA1, and SHA256. SHA256 is the recommended digest. In the RTSS scheme a digest of the original secret is concatenated with the secret itself prior to the splitting of the secret into shares. Later, this digest is compared with any secret recovered by recombining shares. If the hash of the recovered secret does not match the original hash stored in the shares the secret will not be returned. The verifier hash for the secret is not available to shareholders prior to recombining shares.

The specification also addresses the optional implementation of a MAGIC_NUMBER and advanced error correction schemes. These extras are not currently implemented.

TL;DR

No time for docs? Here is how to get going in a minute, using the command line or Ruby, with the default 3 out of 5 secret sharing.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

$ echo 'secret unicode characters ½ ♥ 💩' | tss split -O /tmp/shares.txt
$ tss combine -I /tmp/shares.txt

RECOVERED SECRET METADATA
*************************
hash : 6d1bc4242998bc170d35d374ebdf39295b271db900de25d249563a4622f113e0
hash_alg : SHA256
identifier : 6b02cfcfc24a2b50
process_time : 0.55ms
threshold : 3
secret :
secret unicode characters ½ ♥ 💩

Ruby

$ bundle exec bin/console
> require 'tss'
=> false
> shares = TSS.split(secret: 'my deep dark secret')
=> ["tss~v1~506168fade769236~3~NTA2MTY4ZmFkZTc2OTIzNgIDAEEBIM39jPGXFz4zKCObWgp2zQmCuUx92-VUf48FWQFqnLF3bw6VtVjYK7JRfESZIREdzhWcQuTQVuGKazxWRK27Tg==",
 "tss~v1~506168fade769236~3~NTA2MTY4ZmFkZTc2OTIzNgIDAEEC1E8YyDhp5NeZvF6vHeUT6HoiU0AgoF69jyjNRbtcIi1YoymJTau1rJP-3nQXOofaB2LgnAhJpbB8vrID9WTKgQ==",
 "tss~v1~506168fade769236~3~NTA2MTY4ZmFkZTc2OTIzNgIDAEEDmfvFIKybg8nO9Q9fZ5wARgHFngFQdrbk_arFEbc7s5HedTjzkoZYLlV8xnywt4AVAHAO0nSLY3C7iJPifH5VYA==",
 "tss~v1~506168fade769236~3~NTA2MTY4ZmFkZTc2OTIzNgIDAEEEiBoCoHycMNTS5yQEU8_Sc7eVlIZOJP1-ka_7MPTlC1p2DyNdGvQxy3pBFZyH8WXAY9ICBxiZRDCJisFrebviAg==",
 "tss~v1~506168fade769236~3~NTA2MTY4ZmFkZTc2OTIzNgIDAEEFxa7fSOhuV8qFrnX0KbbB3cxyWcc-8hUn4y3zZPiCmubw2TInxdncSbzDDZQgfGIPZMDsSWRbgvBOvOCK8KF94w=="]
> secret = TSS.combine(shares: shares)
=> {:hash=>"f1b91fef6a7535a974d3644c3eac16d2c907720c981290214d5d1db7cdb724af",
 :hash_alg=>"SHA256",
 :identifier=>"506168fade769236",
 :process_time=>0.94,
 :secret=>"my deep dark secret",
 :threshold=>3}
> puts secret[:secret]
my deep dark secret
=> nil

Is it any good?

While this implementation has not yet had a formal security review, the cryptographic underpinnings were carefully specified in an IETF draft document authored by a noted cryptographer. I have reached out to individuals respected in the field for their work in implementing cryptographic solutions to help review this code.

I've read draft-mcgrew-tss-03 and then took a look at your code. Impressive! Nice docs, clean easy-to-read code. I'd use constant-time comparison for hashes [resolved : 254ecab], but apart from that I have nothing to add. Good job!

-- Dmitry Chestnykh (@dchest)

[v0.1.0 : 4/13/2016]

All that being said, if your threat model includes a Nation State Actor the security of this particular code should probably not be your primary concern.

Suggestions for Use

Documentation

There is pretty extensive inline documentation. You can view the latest auto-generated docs at http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/tss

Supported Ruby Versions

TSS is continuously integration tested on a number of Ruby versions. See the file .travis.yml in the root of this repository for the currently tested versions.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'tss', '~> 0.4'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install tss

Installation Security : Signed Ruby Gem

The TSS gem is cryptographically signed. To be sure the gem you install hasn’t been tampered with you can install it using the following method:

Add my public key (if you haven’t already) as a trusted certificate

# Caveat: Gem certificates are trusted globally, such that adding a
# cert.pem for one gem automatically trusts all gems signed by that cert.
gem cert --add <(curl -Ls https://raw.github.com/grempe/tss-rb/master/certs/gem-public_cert_grempe_2026.pem)

To install, it is possible to specify either HighSecurity or MediumSecurity mode. Since the tss gem depends on one or more gems that are not cryptographically signed you will likely need to use MediumSecurity. You should receive a warning if any signed gem does not match its signature.

# All dependent gems must be signed and verified.
gem install tss -P HighSecurity

# All signed dependent gems must be verified.
gem install tss -P MediumSecurity

# Same as above, except Bundler only recognizes
# the long --trust-policy flag, not the short -P
bundle --trust-policy MediumSecurity

You can learn more about security and signed Ruby Gems.

Installation Security : Signed Git Commits

Most, if not all, of the commits and tags to the repository for this code are signed with my PGP/GPG code signing key. I have uploaded my code signing public keys to GitHub and you can now verify those signatures with the GitHub UI. See this list of commits and look for the Verified tag next to each commit. You can click on that tag for additional information.

You can also clone the repository and verify the signatures locally using your own GnuPG installation. You can find my certificates and read about how to conduct this verification at https://www.rempe.us/keys/.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

When you install the gem a simple tss command-line interface (CLI) is also installed and should be available on your $PATH.

The CLI is a user interface for splitting and combining secrets. You can see the full set of options available with tss help, tss help split, or tss help combine.

CLI Secret Splitting

A secret to be split can be provided using one of three different input methods; STDIN, a path to a file, or when prompted interactively. In all cases the secret should be UTF-8 or US-ASCII encoded text and be no larger than 65,535 Bytes (including header and hash verification bytes).

Each method for entering a secret may have pros and cons from a security perspective. You need to understand what threat model you want to protect against in order to choose wisely. Here are a few examples for how to split a secret.

Example : STDIN

Can read the secret from STDIN and write the split shares to a file. Be cautioned that this method may leave command history which may contain your secret.

echo 'a secret' | tss split -O /tmp/shares.txt

Example : --input-file

Can read the secret from a file and write the split shares to STDOUT. Be cautioned that storing the secret on a filesystem may expose you to certain attacks since it can be hard to fully erase files once written.

$ cat /tmp/secret.txt
my secret
$ tss split -I /tmp/secret.txt
tss~v1~8b66eb89ee25a46c~3~OGI2NmViODllZTI1YTQ2YwIDACsBqgQvwFhKboLMAmYwF5_CvaUwM8pmqUipbMRzakdbP53WJa-E6tf2nl2M
tss~v1~8b66eb89ee25a46c~3~OGI2NmViODllZTI1YTQ2YwIDACsCk1EU-HwvC6pjvQ5wDas221Qs4A7TtJNpi-Su8hxOqrsCSQ8t11aiQUpm
tss~v1~8b66eb89ee25a46c~3~OGI2NmViODllZTI1YTQ2YwIDACsDVCwbS0EGF03btYwqqVuk7S0z-nSinHtPpsFaFm5dys85j3JlK-yCVNyP
tss~v1~8b66eb89ee25a46c~3~OGI2NmViODllZTI1YTQ2YwIDACsEPUzgi8CDn4ix1dLQTQDj2yTdeeQcZAvGuMyQ_H7EepN6WO_KB1DuqTxm
tss~v1~8b66eb89ee25a46c~3~OGI2NmViODllZTI1YTQ2YwIDACsF-jHvOP2qg28J3VCK6fBx7V3CY55tTOPglelkGAzXGudBnpKC--rOvKqP

Example : interactive

Can read the secret interactively from a terminal and write the split shares to STDOUT. This method is more secure since the secret will not be stored in the command shell history or in a file on a filesystem that is hard to erase securely. It does not protect you from simple keylogger attacks though.

$ tss split
Enter your secret, enter a dot (.) on a line by itself to finish :
secret >  the vault password is:
secret >  V0ulT!
secret >  .
tss~v1~1f8532a9d185efc4~3~MWY4NTMyYTlkMTg1ZWZjNAIDAD8BJkMvkHUGPQk1HQr_jVj9JkhavJVkdeFDEtRAf8O6vjksCjMMjiyuUL0bOD7vDnmdrzHK8QVymXU5vnjAREs=
tss~v1~1f8532a9d185efc4~3~MWY4NTMyYTlkMTg1ZWZjNAIDAD8CJpiKCEtSfmugr_gbvEIBs2M2sZfHxuZsBuPpB35OGeyWmGZCyJCNu0W2z3abkV1Q8uTPvT75YYRpw6BcdvQ=
tss~v1~1f8532a9d185efc4~3~MWY4NTMyYTlkMTg1ZWZjNAIDAD8DdLPAuEg1Ng7hkoKFQmmL-lkILWvQiQ15JELFLJz-PvdZucDCqS-X6QAIbwWE3u2XrTgsH1kmIvpMeZhzfPk=
tss~v1~1f8532a9d185efc4~3~MWY4NTMyYTlkMTg1ZWZjNAIDAD8EJT1XJ-DeOXuE3JD6VpZk79945_peSk1ij1Mk5ql-l2jkv85yGBbyH0VIBmJp2WsEMmESZqTsQ9kKB-0Ljq8=
tss~v1~1f8532a9d185efc4~3~MWY4NTMyYTlkMTg1ZWZjNAIDAD8FdxYdl-O5cR7F4epkqL3upuVGewZJBaZ3rfIIzUvOsHMrnmjyeanoTQD2phF2ltvDbb3xxMMzAKcvvdUkhKI=

CLI Share Combining

You can use the CLI to enter shares in order to recover a secret. Of course you will need at least the number of shares necessary as determined by the threshold when your shares were created. The threshold is visible as the third field in every HUMAN formatted share.

As with splitting a secret, there are also three methods of getting the shares into the CLI. STDIN, a path to a file containing shares, or interactively.

Here are some simple examples of using each:

Example : STDIN

$ echo 'a secret' | tss split | tss combine

RECOVERED SECRET METADATA
*************************
hash : d4ea4551e9ff2cf56303875b1901fb8608a6164260c3b20c0976c7b606a4efc0
hash_alg : SHA256
identifier : fff58c38b14734f3
process_time : 0.34ms
threshold : 3
secret :
a secret

Example : --input-file

$ echo 'a secret' | tss split -O /tmp/shares.txt
$ tss combine -I /tmp/shares.txt

RECOVERED SECRET METADATA
*************************
hash : d4ea4551e9ff2cf56303875b1901fb8608a6164260c3b20c0976c7b606a4efc0
hash_alg : SHA256
identifier : ae2983e30e0471fe
process_time : 0.47ms
threshold : 3
secret :
a secret

Example : interactive

$ cat /tmp/shares.txt
# THRESHOLD SECRET SHARING SHARES
# 2017-01-29T02:01:00Z
# https://github.com/grempe/tss-rb


tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoBbga2N__A9QOleLhC5R5b7stJ26iMPNpQ95YpmK-tWIrd-CYcrXGmcys=
tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoCGXsZkLOG7uDOVN1Zn46pqftX4noA8LfXugg14KBfSggYP9fw4Ce10YA=
tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoDFl3cwi80fpdh-I9eK3kNa8V9OlXX1Wx8y5a6bk2S0TDJzocr-1C3TWs=
tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoEEspmyzmbnrSr7v41FFlHVTqQ6dx4aho8q5T1CBHQbNimdCv3gVXS50I=
tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoFHeyjmaUpDsMEQqwyoK7jlwS6MfOvT8GX2gp6hvwd9-B3hXssmiLQe6k=

$ tss combine
Enter shares, one per line, and a dot (.) on a line by itself to finish :
share>  tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoBbga2N__A9QOleLhC5R5b7stJ26iMPNpQ95YpmK-tWIrd-CYcrXGmcys=
share>  tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoCGXsZkLOG7uDOVN1Zn46pqftX4noA8LfXugg14KBfSggYP9fw4Ce10YA=
share>  tss~v1~b9f7f87bc83fd89b~3~YjlmN2Y4N2JjODNmZDg5YgIDACoDFl3cwi80fpdh-I9eK3kNa8V9OlXX1Wx8y5a6bk2S0TDJzocr-1C3TWs=
share>  .

RECOVERED SECRET METADATA
*************************
hash : d4ea4551e9ff2cf56303875b1901fb8608a6164260c3b20c0976c7b606a4efc0
hash_alg : SHA256
identifier : b9f7f87bc83fd89b
process_time : 1.22ms
threshold : 3
secret :
a secret

Ruby : Splitting a Secret

The basic usage is as follows using the arguments described below.

shares = TSS.split(secret: secret,
                   threshold: threshold,
                   num_shares: num_shares,
                   identifier: identifier,
                   hash_alg: hash_alg,
                   padding: true)

Arguments

All arguments are passed as keys in a single Hash.

The secret (required) value must be provided as a String with either a UTF-8 or US-ASCII encoding. The Byte length must be <= 65,486. You can test this beforehand with 'my string secret'.bytes.to_a.length. Keep in mind that this length also includes padding and the verification hash so your secret may need to be shorter depending on the settings you choose.

Internally, the secret String will be converted to and processed as an Array of Bytes. e.g. 'foo'.bytes.to_a

The num_shares and threshold values are Integers representing the total number of shares desired, and how many of those shares are required to re-create a secret. Both arguments must be Integers with a value between 1-255 inclusive. The num_shares value must be greater-than-or-equal-to the threshold value. If you don't pass in these options they will be set to threshold = 3 and num_shares = 5 by default.

The identifier is a 1-16 Byte String that will be embedded in each output share and should uniquely identify a secret. All shares output from the same secret splitting operation will have the same identifier. This value can be retrieved easily from a share header and should be assumed to be known to shareholders. Nothing that leaks information about the secret should be used as an identifier. If an identifier is not set, it will default to the output of SecureRandom.hex(8) which is 8 random hex bytes (16 characters).

The hash_alg is a String that represents which cryptographic one-way hash function should be embedded in shares. The hash is used to verify that the re-combined secret is a match for the original at creation time. The value of the hash is not available to shareholders until a secret is successfully re-combined. The hash is calculated from the original secret and then combined with it prior to secret splitting. This means that the hash is protected the same way as the secret. The algorithm used is secret || hash(secret). You can use one of NONE, SHA1, or SHA256.

The format arg takes an uppercase String Enum with either 'HUMAN' (default) or 'BINARY' values. This instructs the output of a split to either provide an array of binary octet strings (a standard RTSS format for interoperability), or a human friendly URL Safe Base 64 encoded version of that same binary output. The HUMAN format can be easily shared in a tweet, email, or even a URL. The HUMAN format is prefixed with tss~VERSION~IDENTIFIER~THRESHOLD~ to make it easier to visually compare shares and see if they have matching identifiers and if you have enough shares to reach the threshold.

The padding arg accepts a Boolean to indicate whether to apply PKCS#7 padding to the secret string. This is applied and removed automatically by default and padding defaults to a block size of 16 bytes. You probably never need to use this option to turn it off unless you are trying to trade shares with the Python implementation.

Since TSS share data is essentially the same size as the original secret (with a known size header), the padding applied to smaller secrets may help mask the exact size of the secret itself from an attacker. Padding is not part of the RTSS spec so other TSS clients won't strip off the padding and may fail when recombining shares.

Example Usage

secret     = 'foo bar baz'
threshold  = 3
num_shares = 5
identifier = SecureRandom.hex(8)
hash_alg   = 'SHA256'
format     = 'HUMAN'

s = TSS.split(secret: secret, threshold: threshold, num_shares: num_shares, identifier: identifier, hash_alg: 'SHA256', format: format)

=> ["tss~v1~79923b087dab7fa2~3~Nzk5MjNiMDg3ZGFiN2ZhMgIDADEB2qA6IYq8yOGlPAl0B4MgRsVazZMWGLwRNgGMPKutOYbB0gjkVHNqbNYl-0l1f98W",
 "tss~v1~79923b087dab7fa2~3~Nzk5MjNiMDg3ZGFiN2ZhMgIDADECvjwdUHc8MzqvIllR2Rj9TnnlN_2eRUzH6MUsd8ncua4jpXQ3FgM1hUmLHmrgHq0u",
 "tss~v1~79923b087dab7fa2~3~Nzk5MjNiMDg3ZGFiN2ZhMgIDADEDAvNIUZ_hiftofyog257YDWds4q9MP14-rDCxQsauUyxqBtzur6Ch5-rSCHRPt4Dv",
 "tss~v1~79923b087dab7fa2~3~Nzk5MjNiMDg3ZGFiN2ZhMgIDADEEF7zGEx0GSC6YLgVD6xcQispDCO_JTUSDFbsbpalopakh0FmTfmO-JJKGQSlJb1il",
 "tss~v1~79923b087dab7fa2~3~Nzk5MjNiMDg3ZGFiN2ZhMgIDADEFq3OTEvXb8u9fc3Yy6ZE1ydTK3b0bN1Z6UU6GkKYaTytoc_FKx8AqRjHfVzfmxnVk"]

secret = TSS.combine(shares: s)

=> {:hash=>"dbd318c1c462aee872f41109a4dfd3048871a03dedd0fe0e757ced57dad6f2d7",
 :hash_alg=>"SHA256",
 :identifier=>"79923b087dab7fa2",
 :process_time=>0.92,
 :secret=>"foo bar baz",
 :threshold=>3}

Ruby : Combining Shares to Recreate a Secret

The basic usage is:

secret = TSS.combine(shares: shares)

Arguments

All arguments are passed as keys in a single Hash. The return value is either a Hash (with the :secret key being most important and other metadata provided for informational purposes), or an TSS::Error Exception if the secret could not be created and verified with its hash.

shares: (required) : Must be provided as an Array of encoded Share Byte Strings. You must provide at least threshold shares as specified when the secret was split. Providing too few shares will result in a TSS::ArgumentError exception being raised. There are a large number of verifications that are performed on shares provided to make sure they are valid and consistent with each other. An Exception will be raised if any of these tests fail.

select_by: : If the number of shares provided as input to the secret reconstruction operation is greater than the threshold M, then M of those shares are selected for use in the operation. The method used to select the shares can be chosen with the select_by: argument which takes the following values as options:

select_by: 'FIRST' : If X shares are required by the threshold and more than X shares are provided, then the first X shares in the Array of shares provided will be used. All others will be discarded and the operation will fail if those selected shares cannot recreate the secret.

select_by: 'SAMPLE' : If X shares are required by the threshold and more than X shares are provided, then X shares will be randomly selected from the Array of shares provided. All others will be discarded and the operation will fail if those selected shares cannot recreate the secret.

select_by: 'COMBINATIONS' : If X shares are required, and more than X shares are provided, then all possible combinations of the threshold number of shares will be tried to see if the secret can be recreated.

Warning

This COMBINATIONS flexibility comes with a cost. All combinations of threshold shares must be generated before processing. Due to the math associated with combinations it is possible that the system would try to generate a number of combinations that could never be generated or processed in many times the life of the Universe. This option can only be used if the possible combinations for the number of shares and the threshold needed to reconstruct a secret result in a number of combinations that is small enough to have a chance at being processed. If the number of combinations will be too large an Exception will be raised before processing has even started. The default maximum number of combinations that will be tried is 1,000,000.

Fun Fact

If 255 total shares are available, and the threshold value is 128, it would result in 2884329411724603169044874178931143443870105850987581016304218283632259375395 possible combinations of 128 shares that could be tried. That is almost as many combinations (2.88 * 10^75) as there are Atoms in the Universe (10^80).

If the combine operation does not result in a secret being successfully extracted, then a TSS::Error exception will be raised.

A great short read on big numbers is On the (Small) Number of Atoms in the Universe

Exception Handling

Almost all methods in the program have strict contracts associated with them that enforce argument presence, types, and value boundaries. This contract checking is provided by the excellent Ruby Contracts gem. If a contract violation occurs a ParamContractError Exception will be raised.

The splitting and combining operations may also raise the following exception types:

TSS::NoSecretError, TSS::InvalidSecretHashError, TSS::ArgumentError, TSS::Error

All Exceptions should include hints as to what went wrong in the #message attribute.

Share Data Formats

RTSS Binary

TSS provides shares in a binary data format with the following fields, and by default this binary data is wrapped in a 'HUMAN' text format:

Identifier. This field contains 16 octets. It identifies the secret with which a share is associated. All of the shares associated with a particular secret MUST use the same value Identifier. When a secret is reconstructed, the Identifier fields of each of the shares used as input MUST have the same value. The value of the Identifier should be chosen so that it is unique, but the details on how it is chosen are left as an exercise for the reader. The characters a-zA-Z0-9.-_ are allowed in the identifier.

Hash Algorithm Identifier. This field contains a single octet that indicates the hash function used in the RTSS processing, if any. A value of 0 indicates that no hash algorithm was used, no hash was appended to the secret, and no RTSS check should be performed after the reconstruction of the secret.

Threshold. This field contains a single octet that indicates the number of shares required to reconstruct the secret. This field MUST be checked during the reconstruction process, and that process MUST halt and return an error if the number of shares available is fewer than the value indicated in this field.

Share Length. This field is two octets long. It contains the number of octets in the Share Data field, represented as an unsigned integer in network byte order.

Share Data. This field has a length that is a variable number of octets. It contains the actual share data.

0                   1                   2                   3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|                                                               |
|                          Identifier                           |
|                                                               |
|                                                               |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Hash Alg. Id. |   Threshold   |         Share Length          |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
:                                                               :
:                          Share Data                           :
:                                                               :
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

This data format has been tested for binary compatibility with the seb-m/tss Python implementation of TSS. There are test cases to ensure it remains compatible.

RTSS Human Friendly Wrapper

To make tss friendlier to use when sending shares to others, an enhanced text wrapper around the RTSS binary data format is provided.

Shares formatted this way can easily be shared via most any communication channel.

The HUMAN data format is simply the same RTSS binary data, URL Safe Base64 encoded, and prefixed with a String thet contains tilde ~ separated elements. The ~ is used as it is compatible with the URL Safe data and the allowed characters in the rest of the human format string.

tss~VERSION~IDENTIFIER~THRESHOLD~BASE64_ENCODED_BINARY_SHARE

A typical share with this format looks like:

tss~v1~abc~3~YWJjAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIDACQB10mUbJPQZ94WpgKC2kKivfnSpCHTMr6BajbwzqOrvyMCpH0=

Performance

The amount of time it takes to split or combine secrets grows significantly as the size of the secret and the total num_shares and threshold increase. Splitting a secret with the maximum size of 2**16 - 2 (65,534) Bytes and the maximum 255 shares may take an unreasonably long time to run. Splitting and Combining involves at least num_shares**secret_bytes operations so larger values can quickly result in huge processing time. If you need to split large secrets into a large number of shares you should consider running those operations in a background worker process or thread for best performance. For example a 64kb file split into 255 shares, with a threshold of 255 (the max for all three settings), can take 20 minutes to split and another 20 minutes to combine using a modern CPU.

A reasonable set of values seems to be what I'll call the 'rule of 64'. If you keep the secret <= 64 Bytes, the threshold <= 64, and the num_shares <= 64 you can do a round-trip split and combine operation in ~250ms. These should be very reasonable and secure max values for most use cases, even as part of a web request response cycle. Remember, its recommended to split encryption keys, not plaintext.

There are some simple benchmark tests to exercise things with rake bench.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

You can run the Command Line Interface (CLI) in development with bundle exec bin/tss.

The formal release process can be found in RELEASE.md

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/grempe/tss-rb. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Legal

Copyright

(c) 2016-2017 Glenn Rempe <glenn@rempe.us> (https://www.rempe.us/)

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Warranty

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the LICENSE.txt file for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Thank You!

This code is an implementation of the Threshold Secret Sharing, as specified in the Network Working Group Internet-Draft submitted by D. McGrew (draft-mcgrew-tss-03.txt). This code would not have been possible without this very well designed and documented specification. Many examples of the relevant text from the specification have been used as comments to annotate this source code.

Great respect to Sébastien Martini (@seb-m) for his seb-m/tss Python implementation of TSS. It was invaluable as a real-world reference implementation of the TSS Internet-Draft.