Re: Passwords - in a Disaster Recovery Doc/Book

On Mon, 13 Mar 2000 08:44:09 -0600, Mike O <ora7dba_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>I am working on a Disaster Recovery Document for PASSWORDS (Unix, Oracle, NT
>servers, etc). Has anyone tackled this process and have recommendations?

If I am understanding the problem correctly, you may want to look into the use of "secret sharing" cryptosystems. Conceptually, you are splitting up the secret (the password) into a set of chunks for which some pre-defined collection of subsets will enable recovery of the original secret.

As one simple example: if you want to give two people "half" of a password, such that neither half alone is sufficient to recover the password, but if both people collaborate they can recover the password, you would take the plaintext password and a random bit string (RBS) as long as the password; give one person the RBS and the other person the password XORed with the RBS. sci.crypt is the appropriate forum to discuss the details of such schemes, though I'd recommend reading some of the literature on the topic first.

                --Ken Pizzini Received on Fri Mar 17 2000 - 03:45:22 CST