How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works | Hacker News

Large secrets are often handled by encrypting the payload and splitting only the encryption key among shares.

The discussion contrasted Shamir’s Secret Sharing with simpler data-splitting approaches like Reed-Solomon.

It noted that Reed-Solomon splitting can leak information unless it is combined with an all-or-nothing transform.

The takeaway: secret sharing and data splitting have different security properties, and the safer choice depends on the threat model.