

Core Secret – Secret sharing between Bluetooth LE peers on iOS - sebm
http://coresecret.io/

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cantrevealname
Your site is missing some critical information:

What is this idea good for?

Who would use it?

Why is it needed?

Some actual uses cases are needed.

Allow me to start you off:

(1) Suppose your office has a safe. Your on-staff accountant has the
combination and he supervises all access to the safe. But imagine the
difficulties if the accountant fell seriously ill, or if access to the safe
was needed on a holiday or weekend when the accountant couldn't be reached.
Instead of giving the combination to several people as a backup--and thereby
losing accountability--you can divide the combination between 4 people in
which any 2 can reconstruct the key.

(2) You and your two fellow executives are flying into country X for important
business meetings. The border control at country X is known to sometimes snoop
on visitors laptops and smartphones, and even copying data. You and the two
other travelers can split up your confidential documents such that all 3 of
you must be present at the meeting to extract the confidential information. If
one of you is searched at the border crossing, you can _truthfully_ say that
you don't know any password or passphrase to documents in your possession;
only the assembly of 3 people can bring out the originals.

(3) Your company's long-term computer backups--made on network attached
storage or to the cloud--are automatically encrypted. The decryption key can
be shared between the system administrators and executives such that any 2
sysadmins or any 3 executives can recover the decryption key.

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sebm
Thanks for the advices! you're right my page is not explaining enough the
purpose of the app. I'll try to improve it.

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Osmium
Looks interesting, but the name made me think it was a new API or something.
Perhaps not the best choice (though cool).

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sebm
Yeah I know, I'm terrible at choosing names, I started my developements with
this name then by lack of better idea i've kept it.

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hclee
Airdrop can choose a device to share. Isn't Airdrop secured??

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sebm
Indeed the distribution of the ciphertext when using Airdrop relies on the
authentication made by Airdrop (I think that's why Airdrop requires iCloud to
be enabled, but note I'm not sure of that). However the encryption of the
ciphertext and the keys used are independant of Airdrop. In the worst case a
wrong receiver would be selected, he would have the ciphertext but wouldn't be
able to decrypt it.

edit: I think I've wrongly interpreted your question. Are you asking if Core
Secret doesn't simply reimplement what Airdrop provides? If this is your
question, the answer is no, the goal of Core Secret is to divide a secret
between peers, each peer having a portion of the secret.

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DenisM
Tangently related question - is it possible to use Bluetooth API to send
pictures between devices? I wonder if the bandwidth is too low, or if there
any hoops for the user to jump through? Thanks

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bcl
Works fine. I used to have an app in the store that did this (SharePics).

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DenisM
Couldn't find it. Can you give me a link?

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bcl
I lost interest in maintaining it so I dropped it from the store.

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twoodfin
The more or less raw device-to-device communication facilitated by Core
Bluetooth is going to lead to some very interesting iOS applications.

