o, now I will cover a couple of cryptographic transforms that are at present little used. They have a natural affinity with distributed network systems but nearly no applications have been made to do these things.

Secret Shares

Scenario

You want to store a sensitive piece of data to other locations where you may not be able to trust them (centralised file storage services, peer to peer file sharing), and know nobody can get knowledge of what it is. Even well intentioned network storage providers can make mistakes.

Solution

Secret shares are a mehod discovered in the late 70s and early 80s to split a file into multiple parts, and requires some number minimum of pieces, but lets you also create more pieces than minimum, to produce exactly the margin of security vs availabilty you need.

It would be an ideal way to distribute a key to one's digital estate, with several relatives holding the pieces, and if you die or become a vegetable the assets could be distributed to cover costs or execute your will.

The extra pieces act as a backup. You don't want to tell the host what it is, and maybe it gets lost somehow. if you had say 4 minimum, 6 distributed, 1/3 can be lost before you lose the file.

The first schemes required pieces the size of the whole file per piece, but a way was found to lower the size to just a little over the proportion of the piece, i.e.: 5 pieces required to make it, each piece is just over 1/5^th the size of the original file.

Yes, for giggles you could split pieces as well...

If you are anything like me, such a technique is like the plot of too many fantasy novels... but I digress.

It is a technique that can be applied to images also. You can make a picture, then break it up into pieces that resemble an untuned analogue TV, but any of the set, from the minimum number and upwards overlaid and the image appears. It could be applied to sound recordings also, in fact you could also have a key image (a la Johnny Mnemonic) that acts as a secondary key such that it appears to even just be a picture, the data hidden in the "noise". I will discuss this in the final part of this post.

Network Applications of Secret Shares

Currently the methods for obscuring your location have high latency, due to going 3 hops between you and the destination, or worse, 6 with an internal network address (hidden address).

By splitting blocks of data into multiple parts, with a margin of redundancy, the connection could be delayed only by the slowest proxy relay in the set, but you can shift them around and use different proxies periodically, distributing synchronisable pathways and causing them to shift frequently, and even a large adversary will have trouble correlating pathways from source to destination.

Such a scheme could enable low latency, realtime connections like voice, video, and instant messaging, without revealing who speaks to who, like Tor, but without so much lag.

Note that in the more distant future such security could be in the routing layer of the intenet. But I don't expect that for a while. For now it is Presentation Layer, along with other security layers.

All Or Nothing Transform

The All Or Nothing Transform basically scrambles a file, but if the file is complete, distributed in the file is the key to unlock it, but the whole file is required. Even a missing byte and it is lost.

By combining this wih Secret Shares, the chance of cryptanalysis finding data in less than the minimum number of parts, goes to zero because the whole file is its' own key. Only the whole file can be from this decrypted.

Encrypt to a key you control, AONT, then split into secret shares, It would be nearly impossible to get it without the locations of all the minimum number of parts, and then also your key. It would you allow you to store sensitive material where it would normally be risky.

Steganography

Steganography means hiding data within another kind of data in such a way that even close inspection cannot find it. In sound recordings, images and video, bits of another file can be scattered such that it cannot easily even be recognised any other data exists.

It may seem like secret agent level paranoia, but some data can be so valuable it is worth hiding this way, for example a bitcoin wallet, which could be worth a lot of money. Backups could be stored this way, and you could know it was nearly impossible to even know it exists yet give the insurance of further backups, ones that can be left in places nobody would look.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!

_{Loki was born in Australia, now is wandering Amsterdam again after 9 months in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration, preferably while living in a beautiful mountain house somewhere with a good woman, and lots of farm animals and gardens, where he can also go hunting and camping.}

_{I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel}

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All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me