Abstract

This disclosure describes a family of methods for publishing a short locator to a secret — a

destination URL, a paste, a file, or a similar payload — so that the storage operator cannot

learn the secret. A client encrypts the payload under key material the operator never

receives and stores only ciphertext and non-content metadata. The key material may live

in a URI fragment, query string, path, or an out-of-band channel; may be held only on the

creator's device; or may be split among those places. A lookup identifier may be derived

from the same key material as the encryption key, so the operator need not be given a

separately chosen public identifier. A server-held pepper may key the stored index,

including dual-version rotation, so that a dump of the record store alone cannot support

offline guessing of codes. A passphrase mixed into derivation may change the lookup

identifier, so a wrong passphrase cannot even fetch the blob. Padding to size buckets, and

uniform decoy responses to missing lookups, hide length and existence. Per-blob signature

keys with monotonic counters let owners update, expire, delete and share control without

revealing which locators share an owner. Encrypted keyrings, resolver clients that never

execute operator-served script, and validation of destinations after decryption are

included. A creator-held-key family covers private locators, relayed resolution to the

creator's device (including re-wrap to a recipient's ephemeral public key on that device),

per-access approval with optional grants and revocation, split keys, fail-closed behaviour

when the creator is offline, passphrase or second-device backup, and end-to-end encrypted

multi-device synchronisation. Related public art (fragment-key ciphertext stores such as

ZeroBin/PrivateBin and Firefox Send) is acknowledged; this paper dates concrete

combinations and species. Variants matching every element of identified live claims were

withdrawn.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

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