Root credentials. Signing keys. Treasury wallets. Recovery codes. Split them across the people and places you choose, so no single individual holds enough to act alone.
One person holds the production root password. They resign, get fired, or stop responding. The business has a problem it cannot solve at the speed it needs, and every workaround starts with admitting the credential is, effectively, gone.
A single physical location for the master key is a single physical risk. Fire, water, theft, or a former employee who still remembers the combination. There is no quorum to override one location and no backup to fall back on.
A custodial vault provider is itself a target, a subpoena surface, and a business that might not exist in five years. Their breach is your breach. Their failure is your failure. Their bankruptcy is your operations problem.
No single departure, no single breach, and no single failure should be enough to lock the business out.
The credential, key, or recovery code is encrypted with AES-256-GCM on the device of the person running the ceremony. The ciphertext alone is meaningless without the key. Nothing about this step requires a server, an account, or a connection to anyone but you.
The encryption key is divided into N shares using Shamir's Secret Sharing. The threshold K is yours to set. Below K, a share reveals nothing about the key. No single officer, no single device, no single subpoena reaches the threshold alone.
CEO, CFO, Counsel, a board member, a sealed copy in the safe. Each holder gets one shard card and the documents that prepare them for the day someone will try to coerce, deceive, or rush them into recovery they were not supposed to authorize.
A symmetric cipher and a threshold scheme, applied in sequence. The math is from a 1979 paper by Adi Shamir; the cipher is the same used to protect classified material at the highest civilian level.
Authenticated symmetric encryption. GCM mode detects tampering on recovery. Without the encryption key, the ciphertext is meaningless and indistinguishable from random.
From Adi Shamir's 1979 paper. Each share is a point on a polynomial over a finite field. K points reconstruct it. Fewer than K reveal zero information.
A typical operating-company configuration. No single departure is a crisis. No two officers acting together can reconstruct the secret. Three independent parties are required.
Try the cryptography on a throwaway value with no signup. When it fits, choose the tier that matches the way your team actually operates.