Author: Matt Whitlock 2014-03-29 08:51:09
Published on: 2014-03-29T08:51:09+00:00
On March 29, 2014, Tamas Blummer proposed the use of Shamir's Secret Sharing to decompose a seed for a BIP32 master key. He suggested adapting the BIP for a length used there typically 16 or 32 bytes and have a magic code to indicate its use as key vs. seed. Master keys of 32 bytes would work as-is, as ordinary private keys are also 32 bytes. However, secrets of other lengths could be supported if the function that generates a[i] from a[i-1] (which is presently SHA-256) were replaced with a function having parameterized output length, such as scrypt.Blummer also mentioned that Base58Check encodings of shares for secrets of lengths other than 32 bytes would have prefixes other than "SS," but this wouldn't be a significant issue. He suspected that 32 bytes would be the most common secret length anyway.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:02:28.383491+00:00