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by matharmin 1747 days ago
There is no way for the attacker to know how many keys you have. So you can give the attacker 2 keys, while you have your actual sensitive data behind the 5th one.

It could still be a challenge to convince the attacker that you really only had n-1 keys, so you may need to include plausibly-sensitive data in earlier layers.

1 comments

Hum, it the attacker knows that he wants the key for a specific secret, like a Bitcoin wallet, can he just torture you until he gets it?
Well, yeah. There's no system that will defeat rubber hose exploits.
Sure, but there's a significant subset of attackers for whom this isn't an option. For example, I live in the USA. Torturing me because the government thinks there's a 7th key I'm not being up front about isn't an option for them, at least on paper.
Have a different and much smaller bitcoin wallet that serves as a decoy...and have the keys in the 1st layer of encryption.