What's als?
ALS is a (threshold) secret sharing implementation in Python.In the tarball there is a Python package (to build new applications) and some demo scripts ('splitsec', 'joinsec' and 'shareinfo').
What's secret sharing?
Suppose that you and your 6 pals have a Big Secret (e.g.: a randomly generated very long password) and you want that any 4 persons in your group can reconstruct the Big Secret, leaving any group of 3 or less persons without a clue about what the Big Secret was.You take the Big Secret, split it into 7 shares (one for each person in the group), setting a threshold of 4.
The knowledge of 1, 2 or 3 shares can't reveal the Big Secret, while 4 or more people together can reconstruct it.
Wow! That's magic...