Author: Nikita Schmidt 2014-08-14 19:23:16
Published on: 2014-08-14T19:23:16+00:00
In an email exchange, Jan Møller expressed his opinion that the current format of having three encoding formats (long/short/compact) in the Shared Secret Sharing (SSS) standard is over-engineered. He stated that only the long format makes sense from a user experience point of view and suggested that it is only a few bytes longer than the short version. After no objections were raised, the draft was reworked to address this concern.The new version of the SSS standard allows for the shared secret to be in encoded form, such as SIPA or BIP38, instead of a plain private key, making it a general-purpose container for any kind of secret data. This change has several benefits, including not needing to change the specification to carry another type of content, not requiring treatment in the spec for testnet and altcoins, and encoding content-specific metadata together with the secret instead of separately.As the new version of the SSS standard deals with secrets of arbitrary length, using GF(256) as the underlying field becomes much more advantageous than GF(large prime). An inconvenience of variable length is that there is no control over the Base58 prefix. To solve this issue, the magic prefix was moved outside of the Base58 encoded content: SSS-abcdefgh. 'SSS-' acts as the application identifier both to humans and machines, and abcdefgh is the Base58 encoding of the share without any application/magic bytes. However, this change may seem mildly controversial, and alternatives could be considered.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T16:58:22.838266+00:00