background.md

Background

Formulated by Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) in his 1979 paper “How to share a secret”, Shamir's Secret Sharing is an algorithm that allows you to split a secret (e.g. a symmetric encryption key) into $n$ shares, which can be combined later to reconstruct that secret.

Not all shares need to be present for a successful reconstruction, but actually any subset thereof with a size greater than or equal to the minimum threshold $k$, where $2 \le k \le n$. The algorithm mathematically guarantees that knowledge of $k - 1$ shares reveals absolutely no information about the original secret.