Shamirs

Shamirs is a surname of Hebrew origin and may refer to individuals bearing the surname Shamir, most notably Adi Shamir, an Israeli cryptographer and co‑inventor of the RSA public‑key cryptosystem. The name is also associated with Shamir's Secret Sharing, a cryptographic technique developed by Adi Shamir.

Shamir's Secret Sharing is a threshold scheme that allows a secret to be divided into multiple shares such that any specified minimum number of shares (the threshold) can reconstruct the secret, while fewer shares provide no information about it. The scheme encodes the secret as the constant term of a random polynomial of degree t−1, where t is the threshold, over a finite field. Each share corresponds to a point on that polynomial. Reconstruction uses polynomial interpolation, typically Lagrange interpolation, to recover the polynomial and thus the secret. The method provides information-theoretic security and does not rely on computational hardness assumptions, making it suitable for secure key backup, distributed trust, and secure storage.

In addition to its cryptographic use, the surname Shamir is borne by various individuals in Israeli public life and academia. The term Shamirs, in plural form, can refer to people who bear the surname or to topics named after Adi Shamir, most prominently the Shamir’s Secret Sharing scheme. The concept is widely cited in discussions of cryptography, distributed systems, and secure governance.