thresholding to enhance secrecy

[Jay Prime Positive <jpp@markv.com>]

  Summary: You can improve the secrecy of weak cypher systems by using
thresholding.  You can gain linear (or better) improvements for linear
increase in the cyphertext size.  No claim for change in signature
strength is made.

  Thresholding is the name for a way of breaking up a peice of
information into X peices so that Y <= X peices are needed to recover
the information.  If even Y-1 peices recovered, you still have no idea
what the original information is.  A simple thresholding system which
requires 2 out of 2 peices to recover the original is to transform M
into R and R+M where R is a random bit stream, and R+M is the same
random bit stream xored with the message.

  Concider the weak cypher systems S1, S2, S3...  where each has a
probability of being 'broken' X1, X2, X3...  requireing the (expected)
expense of E1, E2, ... EN effort.  Threshold your message P into N
peices, P1, P2, P3, PN, such that all N are required to recover the
message.  Send S1(P1), S2(P2), S3(P3)... SN(PN).  I belive that the
probability of breaking this system should be (1-X1)*(1-X2)*(1-X3)*
...*(1-XN) and that the effort to break it to be E1+E2+...EN (with a
smaller deviation that the sum of the deviations of Ei).  This is only
a linear increase in effort, but more than linear increase in the
probability of secrecy.  (right?)

  If people fear that PGP doesn't provide strong enough secrecy, we
could switch to PGP^3, or even PGP^10.  And if people are going to
compress their messages anyway, there doesn't seem to be any good
reason NOT to switch to PGP^2.

  There is probably a similar system which increases the strength of
signatures too.  Any ideas?  (I suspect the naive aplication of
thresholding here will DECREASE signature strength.)  How about a way
to *exponentialy* increase the effort and probability?  Then it
wouldn't matter much how weak our cyphers were!

j'