I've always wondered about this, and one of the ideas I've been playing with my ... | Hacker News

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		janitha on June 30, 2009 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my pas... I've always wondered about this, and one of the ideas I've been playing with my head is the distributing the keys between a few people, and if something were to happen, they can combine them to unlock my secret (all the keys must be present) SECRET xor KEY_A xor KEY_B xor KEY_C xor KEY_D = PUBLIC This is kind of lame, but the same principle...

jf on July 1, 2009 | [–]

What you are looking for is Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamirs_Secret_Sharing

functional-tree on June 30, 2009 | [–]

Interesting, but then if one person loses it, you're out of luck.

paulgb on June 30, 2009 | [–]

If you want to get sophisticated you could use Reed-Solomon encoding to avoid this problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed-Solomon_error_correction

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