George Blakley
More info
- Affiliation
- Texas A&M University
- Known for
- Geometric secret sharing (1979)
The mathematician who invented secret sharing the same year as Adi Shamir — and watched the other version become the one everybody cites.
In 1979 G. R. Blakley published "Safeguarding Cryptographic Keys" at the National Computer Conference. The idea: split a key so that any k of n shares rebuild it, while fewer reveal nothing useful. Blakley's construction is geometric — the secret is a point, each share a hyperplane through it, and k planes meet exactly there.
That same year Adi Shamir published "How to Share a Secret", built on polynomials. Shamir's scheme has smaller shares and is the one that ended up in libraries and textbook chapters, but the two solved secret sharing independently.