python-gfshare: Secret sharing in Python

I've just released python-gfshare, a Python library that implements Shamir’s method for secret sharing, a technique to split a "secret" into multiple parts.

An arbitrary number of those parts are then needed to recover the original file but any smaller combination of parts are useless to an attacker.

For instance, you might split a GPG key into a “3-of-5” share, putting one share on each of three computers and two shares on a USB memory stick. You can then use the GPG key on any of those three computers using the memory stick.

If the memory stick is lost you can ultimately recover the key by bringing the three computers back together again.

For example:

$ pip install gfshare

>>> import gfshare
>>> shares = gfshare.split(3, 5, b"secret")
>>> shares
{104: b'1\x9cQ\xd8\xd3\xaf',
 164: b'\x15\xa4\xcf7R\xd2',
 171: b'>\xf5*\xce\xa2\xe2',
 173: b'd\xd1\xaaR\xa5\x1d',
 183: b'\x0c\xb4Y\x8apC'}
>>> gfshare.combine(shares)
b"secret"

After removing two "shares" we can still reconstruct the secret as we have 3 out of the 5 originals:

>>> del shares['104']
>>> del shares['171']
>>> gfshare.combine(shares)
b"secret"

Under the hood it uses Daniel Silverstone’s libgfshare library. The source code is available on GitHub as is the documentation.

Patches welcome.

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