Patent 7958354 was granted and assigned to Rockwell Collins on June, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Using a high order shared knowledge mechanism where multiple parties are given multiple shares of a shared ‘common’ secret data, dependent upon role and scenario. It is possible to distribute pre-generated, accountable, as well as escrowed key material to remote units. When the order of the shares and quantities are controlled properly, it is possible to compromise an entity distributing the knowledge shares allowing reconstruction of ‘common’ secret data without loss of the actual data, and compromise of any party receiving the knowledge shares only compromises the common secret data which have already been distributed to that party. Multiple common secret data may be distributed to remote units which are only required to store a single set of knowledge shares to enable reception of multiple common secret data.