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+# Verifiable Secret Sharing for Shamir Threshold Scheme
+
+This implementation was part of the contribution for the following paper:
+
+Bailey Kacsmar, Chelsea Komlo, Florian Kerschbaum, Ian Goldberg.
+"Mind the Gap: Ceremonies for Applied Secret Sharing."
+Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Vol. 2020, No. 2. 18
+pages. April 2020.
+
+This library presents a subset of the presented improvements to Shamir's
+threshold scheme presented in this paper. As such, this library provides the
+ability for participants to verify the integrity of shares received by a central dealer,
+and for participants to update shares in the future, providing protection
+against an adversary who can collect a threshold number of shares across
+update epochs, but not within a single epoch.
+
+## Use
+
+Note that this library does not provide support for serialization and
+deserialization of shares in order to securely transmit and store shares after
+they have been generated. Furthermore, the caller of ```generate_shares``` will
+need to account for securely deleting shares once they have been properly
+transmitted to participants.
+
+Furthermore, this library does not account for how participants should handle
+the case when a share or update is not valid.
+
+## Additional Improvements
+
+Note that although the paper discusses additional improvements to Shamir's
+Threshold Scheme, we did not include all improvements in this library due the
+variance in implrementation requirements. For examle, when operating in
+Extended Mode, the integrity value can be distributed along with shares in
+order to allow for validating the secret document upon recovery. However, as
+platform and security requirements can change how documents are encrypted, we
+opted to not include improvements for the Extended mode of operation in this
+library; see the paper (Figure 5 specifically) for more details.
+
+## Development
+
+Development on this project is frozen and will not implement any additional features.
+Forking this project to extend features is welcome.
+
+Running tests for this project is standard to any Cargo library. To run tests,
+run:
+
+```
+cargo test
+```
+
+within the ```vss``` source directory.