== Description
   A libary for sharing secrets in an information-theoretically secure way.
   It uses Shamir's secret sharing to enable sharing a (random) secret between
   n persons where k <= n persons are enough to recover the secret. k-1 secret
   share holders learn nothing about the secret when they combine their shares.

   This library is based on the OpenXPKI::Crypto::Secret::Split Perl module used
   in the open source PKI software OpenXPKI, which was written by Alexander Klink
   for the OpenXPKI project in 2006.

== Prerequisites
   This package requires Ruby 1.8 or later.

== Installation instructions
   rake test (optional)
   rake install (non-gem) or rake install_gem (gem)

== Synopsis
   require 'secretsharing'

   # create an object for 3 out of 5 secret sharing
   s = SecretSharing::Shamir.new(5,3)

   # create a random secret (returns the secret)
   s.create_random_secret()

   # show secret
   puts s.secret

   # show password representation of secret (Base64)
   puts s.secret_password

   # show shares
   s.shares.each { |share| puts share }

   # recover secret from shares

   s2 = SecretSharing::Shamir.new(3)
   # accepts SecretSharing::Shamir::Share objects or
   # string representations thereof
   s2 << s.shares[0]
   s2 << s.shares[2]
   s2 << s.shares[4]
   puts s2.secret

== Copyright
   (c) 2010-2011 Alexander Klink

== License
   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

== Warranty
   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.

== Author
   Alexander Klink
   secretsharing@alech.de
   http://www.alech.de
   @alech on Twitter