ShareSafe -- ready to use secret sharing

Command line interface for Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing

Sunday 03 December 2017

ShareSafe is available and ready to use. It allows users to leverage Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing (PVSS).

What it is

It is a library (first at all) that provides simple interfaces to make use of PVSS to encrypt/decrypt data.

A command line interface (CLI) is provided with the package and it is what we will be talking about here.

With what

The library is built on top of the pvss library built and maintained by IOHK (the company behind cardano-sl and the cryptocurrency ADA) and on top of cryptonite.

sharesafe: simple secret sharing

What is Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing

Quickly, PVSS is a protocol to allow users to create (and verify) a secret made by n participants. These n participants only shares their n public keys to create a secret. They have decided that m participants (0 < m <= n) are needed to retrieve the Secret.

Very simple : n participants only share their public keys. All or a subset are needed to recover the secret.

What's with sharesafe ?

The generated/retrieved secret can be used for multiple purpose. One of them, the one used in sharesafe, is for symmetric encryption.

i.e. if one want to send private data, it only needs the public key of the recipient. So now you can say that there is already asymmetric encryption for that and you would be right. PVSS here is interesting because you can add yourself in the scheme. The sender can set itself as a participant of share and can retrieve the same secret.

This is interesting because it provides us with a way to verify who participated to a given secret/share.

You can checkout the use case described in the of sharesafe

How to use the CLI to generate private key

create the keypair and share the public key

# generate to the standard output
sharesafe key new
# generate in a file
sharesafe key new -o <generated-key-pair>

by default we are not setting a password for the secret. If you want to set a password, use --password. By default the password is the empty string.

To export the public key:

# by default `sharesafe` will read the keypair from the standard input
# and will write the exported public key to the standard output.
sharesafe key export-public -i <generated-key-pair> -o <exported-public-key>

Create an encryption key

This command will create the shares for every participants, the commitments and the encryption key.

  • the shares will be needed to recover the secret later on. Only the secret key associated to the share can unlock the share;
  • you will need the same amount as the threshold of unlocked shares to recover the secret;
  • the commitments can be used to check the shares;
  • encryption-key is the key generated from the secret;

This command will create a locked share for every given <public-key>: the name will be the input file name with the suffix replaced to share.

sharesafe pvss new --participant public-key1 \
                   --participant public-key2 \
                   --threshold=1 \
                   --commitments commitments \
                   -o encryption-key

Once you have generated the shares, you can simply share them Publicly (or not). Only the private key associated to the public key used to generate the share can unlock the share.

Verify a share against the commitments

sharesafe pvss verify -s <locked-share> -c commitments

Unlock the share

sharesafe pvss open-share -s <share-file> -k <private-key> -o <opened-share>

Recover the encryption key

sharesafe pvss recover -s $(cat <opened-share>) \
                       -o encryption-key.recovered

How to use the CLI for encryption

The encryption-key is generated using Diffie-Hellman derivation from the PVSS secret. The encryption algorithm provided is ChaChaPoly1305. It provides a default authentication of the ciphered content.


cat input-file | \
  sharesafe cipher encrypt -k $(cat encryption-key) > input-file.encrypted


cat input-file.encrypted | \
  sharesafe cipher decrypt -k $(cat encryption-key) > input-file